Harger: ‘Seattle, we have a problem.’ Head of the Downtown Seattle Association warns about the city’s JumpStart Tax
Apr 15, 2026, 5:59 AM
A photo of Downtown Seattle. (Photo: Julia Dallas, MyNorthwest)
(Photo: Julia Dallas, MyNorthwest)
Jon Scholes runs the Downtown Seattle Association. Earlier this week, he posted something on LinkedIn that deserves a wider audience. He opened with five words in all caps.
“SEATTLE WE HAVE A PROBLEM.”
“Seattle’s JumpStart Tax,” he wrote, “has jump-started Bellevue’s economy. Not Seattle’s.”
Then he added this: “We don’t need more business taxes in Seattle. We need more businesses in Seattle paying taxes.”
I’ll give whoever named that tax some credit. JumpStart is a great name. It’s optimistic, forward-looking, and really rolls off the tongue.
They just didn’t specify which city was getting jumped.
What Seattle’s JumpStart Tax actually is
The JumpStart Tax, officially the Seattle Payroll Expense Tax, is a city-level employer-paid payroll tax on large businesses operating in Seattle. It passed in July 2020 and took effect on January 1, 2021. Here’s how it works:
A business is subject to the tax if it has more than roughly $9 million in total Seattle payroll and at least one employee earning above about $194,000. The tax is paid by the employer, not deducted from paychecks. Rates range from about 0.75% to 2.557%, depending on company size and how much individual employees earn. The biggest companies with the highest-paid employees get hit the hardest.
This wasn’t Scholes venting out of nowhere. Last week, he sat down with Gee and Ursula right here on KIRO Newsradio and laid out the same concern in detail. He said Seattle simply isn’t attractive right now to employers looking to grow. They’re choosing the east side of the lake.
Seattle lost 6K jobs to Bellevue as Amazon, Snowflake, TikTok, OpenAI all chose the Eastside
The numbers back Scholes up. Amazon moved thousands of employees across the lake. Snowflake relocated 700 workers to the Eastside. TikTok and OpenAI skipped Seattle entirely. Didn’t even stop for coffee. UW’s Foster School tallied it up: Seattle lost nearly 6,000 jobs. Bellevue gained more than 4,000.
“We’ve become a tax outlier in our region, and people are making other choices,” Scholes said on “The Gee and Ursula Show.”
Businesses prefer boring. Seattle has not been boring. Seattle has been a surprise per week.
Downtown Seattle office buildings lost half their value. Someone has to make up the difference.
Scholes said the top 10 most valuable buildings in downtown Seattle are now worth less than half of what they were four years ago. Property taxes are based on assessed value. When the combined value of those towers ran into the billions, they carried a massive share of Seattle’s tax load. Schools. Roads. Parks. City services.
That value didn’t just evaporate. The tax burden had to go somewhere, and it went to the people who couldn’t leave. The homeowner in Beacon Hill, the small business owner in Ballard, and the renter whose landlord passed the increase along. When the big buildings empty out, the rest of us make up the difference.
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Seattle vacant office space tax: taxing the empty chair won’t bring anyone back
With Katie Wilson as mayor, there’s a proposal floating around to tax vacant commercial office space. The idea is that empty buildings should be penalized until landlords lower rents and fill them back up.
It’s creative, I’ll give it that.
Those buildings aren’t empty because landlords enjoy losing rent. They’re empty because the tenants moved to Bellevue. Taxing the empty chair doesn’t bring anyone back to sit in it.
To his credit, Scholes was generous about Wilson. He said she’s sent some encouraging signals and that pushing city departments for budget cuts is the right instinct. But he was careful about it. A lot of progress has been made downtown, he said, but that progress is tenuous.
If the statewide JumpStart Tax passes, the escape valve isn’t Bellevue anymore
Right now, the escape valve is Bellevue. 15 minutes across the bridge, same talent pool, and no JumpStart Tax. A statewide version of that payroll tax was introduced in Olympia this session. It died without a vote. But the people who wrote it are already planning to bring it back.
Here’s the thing. Progressive lawmakers in Olympia look at the JumpStart Tax and see a success story. It generated more revenue than projected. It funds programs they care about. From where they sit, the model works. So they want to scale it. Take it statewide. Layer it on top of the new income tax that Governor Ferguson just signed. Two new taxes on employers, statewide, in the same session.
The statewide version didn’t get anywhere this session. But all indications are that it will be back on the table in Olympia next year. And if that happens, the calculation changes entirely.
If it passes, the escape valve isn’t Bellevue anymore.
It’s Texas.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
