In Seattle, as in most big cities, the population swells on weekdays as commuters flood into town for work — a key part of what's called the daytime population. But recent census data shows that in Seattle and many other cities, the population isn't swelling like it used to.
To see how much things have changed, I crunched the numbers on what policy wonks call net commuters" — simply put, this is the number of workers commuting into a city minus the number of workers commuting out of the city. Most big cities have a positive net commuter number, meaning a greater number of people commute in than commute out.
I calculated the number of net commuters using census data — the method may seem a bit roundabout, but it works. I did so by subtracting the number of employed city residents (no matter where their job is) from the total number of people who work within the city. For Seattle, this calculation reveals a significant commuter evaporation since the pandemic.
In 2019, about 663,800 people worked in Seattle on a typical weekday. Meanwhile, the city was home to roughly 461,500 employed residents. The difference between those two groups gave Seattle a net daytime surplus of about 202,300 commuters.
The most recent data, from 2024, shows 643,300 people working in Seattle, while the number of employed residents grew to 476,400. That shrinks our net commuter surplus down to about 166,900. That's a loss of roughly 35,000 net daily commuters, a 17.5% drop over five years.
Look closely, and a second trend pops out: The total number of people working in Seattle fell, even as the city's population of employed residents grew.
Seattle's population increased by 27,000 from 2019 to 2024, which explains the growth in employed residents. But how did Seattle lose daytime workers at the same time? It all traces back to the rise of remote work during the pandemic.
Before 2020, working from home was a niche form of employment. In 2019, fewer than 7% of employed residents in the Seattle metro area worked remotely. By 2021, that had surged to 31%. It's been declining since, landing around 19% in 2024 — still about triple the prepandemic rate.
Here is how that shift changes the math: Someone who used to commute into Seattle but now works from home in the suburbs no longer counts as "working in Seattle, wiping them from the city's daytime population. Meanwhile, a Seattle resident who used to commute out to Redmond or Bellevue but now works from home gets counted as working in Seattle instead, boosting the city's daytime population.
The net effect is that the city lost daytime workers: The large drop in suburban commuters coming into Seattle outweighed the smaller gain from residents who once commuted out but now work from home.
Seattle isn't alone. I ran the same numbers for the 50 largest U.S. cities, and it turns out our commuter evaporation is part of a much larger national recalibration.
Of those 50 cities, 36 saw a decline in net commuters. In absolute terms, Seattle's loss of roughly 35,000 daily commuters ranks 12th biggest.
San Francisco tops the list: The city shed nearly 105,000 net commuters over the same five years. Washington, D.C., wasn't far behind, losing roughly 90,000, while Chicago saw about 87,000 daily commuters disappear from its ledger.
Most of the places bucking the trend are in the Sun Belt, with five in Texas. Houston added 54,000 net commuters, the most of any city. Both its population and its number of resident workers expanded significantly over the same period.
Houston also ranked No. 1 for the surplus of net commuters, at 827,600, beating out New York for the top spot.
It's also worth noting that while most big cities have a net commuter surplus — in other words, their daytime population grows with inbound commuters — a handful run a permanent deficit, meaning more residents leave the city for work each day than arrive as commuters. San Jose, Calif., had the largest such deficit in the country: In 2024, about 71,800 more of its residents worked outside the city than the number of outside workers who came in, as its residents fan out to job centers like Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View and San Francisco.
For Seattle, the days of 200,000-plus commuters pouring into city limits five days a week may be over. But the data makes one thing clear: Our daytime workforce didn't just disappear — it redistributed. Downtown high-rises might be quieter on a Monday morning, but somewhere — a home office, a suburb, a job center outside city limits — that work is still getting done.
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