Seattle ranked No. 1 among large U.S. metro areas for the concentration of tech workers with cutting-edge skills, according to Burning Glass Institute’s October 2023 Cities on the Tech Frontier report. The ranking covered the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area; it did not mean Seattle had the largest tech workforce, and the result does not establish which metro leads today.
What the report ranked
The report compared metro areas by the concentration of technology skills and occupations that Burning Glass Institute characterized as having high growth and value. GeekWire described the comparison group as regions with at least 25,000 tech workers, and reported Seattle ahead of Silicon Valley, Boston and Austin. The measure focused on the share and mix of workers with valued skills—not simply the total number of technology workers or the size of a region’s economy.
Burning Glass Institute’s analysis drew on career histories for more than 65 million U.S. workers and job postings from Lightcast. That figure describes the dataset, not the size of Seattle’s tech workforce. The sources do not give a standalone count of Seattle-area tech workers or an exact percentage of local workers who had the skills measured.
Why Seattle stood out
GeekWire pointed to the University of Washington and its computer science program, as well as Microsoft and Amazon, as part of the region’s talent and employer base. It also reported that outside companies had established more than 100 engineering centers in the area. These details provide context for Seattle’s technology ecosystem; they do not show that any one university, company or investment caused the ranking.
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#1 Best Overall
In GeekWire’s 2023 coverage, Stuart Andreason, managing director of workforce innovation at Burning Glass Institute, said: “Seattle’s strength isn’t just in numbers. Its workers lead the pack in having the most cutting-edge skills, and that lead is growing, with Microsoft, Amazon, and other local companies making huge investments in the AI technologies reshaping the tech sector.”
Skills ranking versus growth ranking
GeekWire also reported that Seattle placed first on a separate momentum list. That measure looked at tech-employment growth and growth in jobs requiring highly valued skills over 2017–2021. It is distinct from the ranking of skill concentration: one describes the mix of skills in the workforce, while the other captures changes over a historical period.
Rank #2
Is Seattle still the top U.S. tech city?
The cited result is a snapshot published in October 2023, not evidence of a 2026 ranking. It supports saying that the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area ranked first for cutting-edge tech-skill concentration in that report. It does not establish that Seattle remains No. 1 today, or that it leads on other measures such as total tech employment.
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