Companies in Seattle: the headquarters, the employers and the 110,685 businesses behind them

This page is for anyone working out which companies in Seattle matter to them: job seekers comparing employers, buyers looking for a local partner, analysts sizing the regional economy, and B2B sellers choosing which part of Puget Sound to work. It covers the headquarters the region is known for, the employers with the most people in Washington, the full business count from federal data, and the free public records for finding and checking any company.

Seattle's business market at a glance

The two business counts measure different things. County Business Patterns (CBP) counts locations with a paid workforce across King, Snohomish and Pierce counties. Seattle's license data counts every business licensed to operate in the city, with or without employees; 59,346 of the 85,309 give a Seattle address, and the rest are firms based elsewhere that do business in the city.

The biggest companies headquartered in the Seattle area

Ranked by revenue in each company's latest annual report on Form 10-K, among SEC-registered public companies whose 10-K cover names a principal executive office in the metro:

Microsoft and Costco have already filed for fiscal years ending in mid-2026; Starbucks' latest 10-K covers the year to September 2025. Coupang is run from Seattle, but its 10-K says most of its roughly 108,000 employees are in Korea. T-Mobile's 10-K names two headquarters, Bellevue and Overland Park, Kansas.

Two famous names are missing. Boeing's 10-K gives its head office as Arlington, Virginia, though it notes that its largest union local represents more than 30,000 manufacturing employees, mostly in Washington. Nordstrom filed to delist in May 2025 and to deregister in June 2025 after going private, so it no longer publishes results. The full ranked list is on our biggest companies in Seattle page.

What Seattle companies do

Average pay is our calculation from CBP payroll and employees. Two rows explain Seattle. Information, which includes software publishers and cloud and data services, has 2.2% of establishments, 7.7% of employees and 21.2% of all payroll. Management of companies, the Census category for corporate and regional head offices, has just 693 establishments but 118,392 employees, 6.3% of the metro total. For the software and IT side, see tech companies in Seattle.

How big they are and where

That's 95,337 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 12,665 with 20 to 99 and 2,683 with 100 or more.

King County has 63.6% of establishments and 69.3% of jobs. Snohomish (Everett) and Pierce (Tacoma) each have about 18% of establishments. CBP counts locations, not companies, leaves out government and the self-employed, and measures employment in the pay period including March 12, 2023.

Seattle's largest employers

Greater Seattle Partners, the region's public-private economic development organization, lists Washington's top employers by in-state employment in its 2025 economic overview, published in May 2026:

Amazon employs about 1.58 million people worldwide but 92,000 in Washington. For county lists, government employers and what the job data shows, see the largest employers in Seattle.

Finding and checking a Seattle company

Before you hire a Seattle contractor or sign with a supplier, check the license in the City's lookup, the entity in the state filing system and, for construction and trades work, the L&I record. A UBI number on an invoice ties all three together.

Prospecting Seattle companies

The industrial belt south of downtown is a different market from the offices of South Lake Union and Bellevue. There, buyers are owners and plant or operations managers, not procurement teams.

Illustrative example. The firm, prices and results are fictional; the license count is from the City's data.

Duwamish Safety (duwamishsafety.example) sells forklift and fall-protection training to industrial employers.

• In the City's active license data, 485 businesses in the 98106, 98108 and 98134 ZIP codes south of downtown have manufacturing, wholesale or transportation NAICS codes.
• It assumes a third have enough staff and equipment to need certified training: about 160 accounts.
• At $4,800 per site per year and a 15% win rate over a year, that's about 24 sites and $115,000 in annual revenue.
• It contacts the operations or plant manager first, then the owner, who signs off on anything over a few thousand dollars.

Sorting 485 licenses into businesses with real crews and forklifts is the slow part. Bebop can search for "manufacturers and distributors in Georgetown and SODO with 20 to 99 employees and a warehouse" and explain why each fits.

Subject: Forklift recertification for [Company]

Hi [first name],

Most warehouses we visit between Georgetown and SODO have a few operators whose forklift certification lapsed without anyone noticing until an inspection or an incident.

We run on-site forklift and fall-protection training for Seattle industrial firms, scheduled around your shifts, with records ready for L&I. Would a quick audit of your crew's certification dates be useful?

[Your name], Duwamish Safety

Next step: turn these counts into named accounts with how to build a prospect list.