Moving to Seattle from Washington, DC: What to Know (2026 Guide)

Updated November 2026. By Ryan Palardy, JD, Real Estate Agent and Washington Attorney, Get Happy at Home at Compass.

You’d have company. In the most recent IRS migration data (tax filings from 2022 to 2023), about 1,630 people moved from the DC area to King County, and about 1,490 went the other way. That was before the federal workforce started shrinking. From early 2025 to mid-2026, the region lost more than 63,000 federal jobs, so I’d expect the northbound number to be higher when the next release comes out. If you’re one of them, the jobs section below is honest about what Seattle’s market can and can’t absorb.

The adjustments are different from what Californians deal with. You’re used to old houses, a real transit system and a city built around one employer. Two of those three carry over. Here’s how it plays out line by line.

The money: what your DC budget buys in Seattle

Sources: home prices, price per square foot and days on market from Redfin’s Washington, DC and Seattle housing market pages (all home types, three months ending September 2026). Rents are average apartment asking rents from Apartments.com, October 2026. DC property tax rate, homestead deduction and cap from the DC Office of Tax and Revenue (tax year 2027, which began October 1, 2026). DC transfer and recordation rates from the Recorder of Deeds. Seattle property tax bills from our NWMLS pull of Seattle house sales, October 2025 to September 2026 (5,717 sales). Who pays which is DC custom, not statute. Income and estate tax from the Tax Foundation (2026). Sales tax from the Sales Tax Institute. Rainfall from NOAA’s 1991 to 2020 climate normals.

So the median Seattle home costs about 29% more, and about 11% more per square foot. That gap is smaller than it looks if you’re coming from Arlington, Bethesda or Northwest DC, where prices already run ahead of the District’s median, and bigger if you’re coming from Prince George’s County or the outer Virginia suburbs. If you’re shopping for a detached house, figure on more like $993k: that was the median for detached Seattle houses that sold from July through September (our own pull of NWMLS data, 1,162 sales). The median across all of King County was $850,000 in September, per the NWMLS. A DC rowhouse budget buys a Seattle house with a yard and a basement, a couple of miles farther from downtown than you’re used to.

Rent is about $200 a month lower here at the average, which makes renting for six months to a year before you buy cheap insurance. I’d do it through a winter.

The bigger shock is speed. DC homes are taking about 63 days to sell, prices slipped 1.5% over the past year, and Redfin counts two offers on the average house. Seattle homes are taking 19 days. You’re used to having time to think, get a second showing, and negotiate after inspection. On the right Seattle house you usually don’t get that, which is a big reason we do the homework (inspection notes, repair costs, comps) before you’re standing in the living room. That said, Seattle buyers have more choice than they did a year ago: King County had 31% more listings in September than the year before.

Taxes: leaving the District, arriving in Washington State

This is the section where the move pays for itself, with three lines going the other way. Here’s the honest version.

1. Income tax: one of the biggest savings on our list

DC’s income tax runs from 4% on the first $10,000 to 8.5% above $60,000, 9.25% above $250,000, and 10.75% above $1 million. Virginia is a flat-ish 5.75% above $17,000. Maryland’s state rate reaches 5.75% at $250,000, and every county adds its own, averaging about 2.4% of income. Washington has no income tax on wages at all. A District household with $250,000 of taxable income is paying somewhere around $19,000 a year in DC income tax before deductions. In Seattle that line is zero. For most people reading this, that number is bigger than the increase in the house payment.

Two Washington taxes to know about. The capital gains tax is 7% on long-term gains above an annual deduction ($278,000 for 2025, adjusted each year for inflation) and 9.9% on gains over $1 million. Real estate is exempt. Stock isn’t, so if you’re sitting on a big position, talk to your CPA about timing before you establish Washington residency. And in March 2026, Washington passed a 9.9% tax on household income above $1 million, starting with tax year 2028; voters kept it in November 2026 by rejecting Initiative 645. If your household earns under $1 million a year, it doesn’t touch you. Even at the top, it’s below DC’s rate on the same dollar.

2. Property tax goes up, in rate and in dollars

DC’s residential rate is $0.85 per $100 of assessed value, after a homestead deduction of $95,100 for the current tax year, and the taxable value of a homestead can’t rise more than 10% a year. On a $665k house that’s about $4,850. Seattle’s effective rate is about 0.98% of full market value, with no homestead deduction and no cap, and the typical house that sold over the past year carried about $8,400. State law requires every county to revalue every property every year, so the bill follows the market. (Washington limits how fast each taxing district’s total levy can grow, so bills don’t track values one for one, but there’s no cap on your house’s number.) Budget for roughly $3,500 a year more, and more than that on a detached house. If you want to check an assessment once you’re here, we wrote about King County assessment errors.

3. Sales tax and the estate tax both get worse

Seattle’s sales tax is 10.55%, against 6% in the District (7% starting October 2027). That’s the biggest sales tax jump of any city we’ve written about except Portland, and you’ll notice it on the car, the furniture and the appliances, which is to say right after you move. On estates, DC exempts the first $4.99 million or so and taxes the rest at up to 16%. Washington, for deaths on or after July 1, 2026, exempts the first $3 million and taxes the rest from 10% to 20%. A paid-down Seattle house plus a federal pension’s survivor benefits plus a TSP gets to $3 million faster than people expect, so update your estate plan when you move. (If you’re coming from Virginia, which has no estate tax, this is a new line entirely.)

If you freelance or run a business

Washington has no income tax, but it does have a business and occupation (B&O) tax, charged on gross receipts rather than profit. If you’re a contractor or consultant earning $12,000 or more a year, the Department of Revenue expects you to register and file. A small business credit wipes out the tax for a lot of solo operators, but you still have to register to get it. Seattle also requires its own business license, and starting in 2026 Seattle’s own B&O tax doesn’t kick in until $2 million in revenue. If you’re leaving federal service to consult, which a lot of people are, this one is worth a call to a Washington CPA early.

Which Seattle neighborhood is like your DC neighborhood?

One warning: Seattle neighborhoods change block to block, partly because of the hills and partly because of the age of the houses. The District has that quality too, so you’ll recognize it. There are almost no master-planned communities inside the city, no HOA on most houses, and no guarantee the house next door was built in the same decade as yours. That’s why we start new clients with a learning tour before anyone writes an offer.

Seattle houses: the same age as yours, built of wood

You’ll feel more at home in this section than most people who read it. Among the detached houses that sold in Seattle from July through September 2026, the median one was built in 1945, about 39% were built before 1940, and 72% before 1960 (our NWMLS pull, 1,162 sales). If you’ve owned a Petworth rowhouse or a Chevy Chase colonial, you know what an old house asks of you: a basement that’s seen water, radiators or a converted oil furnace, plumbing that’s been patched in three eras, and a roof with a story. Seattle’s list rhymes with yours. (Our decade-by-decade guide to Seattle homes covers what each era tends to have.) New construction exists, but it’s mostly townhouses in the city and single-family in the far suburbs, and it carries a premium.

The differences are material, literally. DC is brick. Seattle is wood frame, because the trees were here and the clay wasn’t, and a wood house that’s been wet for 80 winters has its own habits: rot at the sill, moss on the roof, and a crawl space instead of a full basement under a lot of them. Your lead service line has a cousin here called the side sewer, and the old oil tank that a lot of DC houses kept in the basement is often buried in the yard in Seattle. Here’s what the usual suspects cost, from our construction company’s billed jobs where we have them and current Seattle contractor pricing where we don’t:

None of these is a reason to skip an old house. They’re reasons to read the inspection for dollars. Get the sewer scoped on video on every house. Ask whether the house ever heated with oil. Look at drainage around the foundation and in the crawl space, because that’s where Seattle’s rain shows up first. A Seattle home inspection will flag most of this, and we price the big items on the spot when we tour, because that’s the number that should move your offer.

Air conditioning is the one you’ll notice. In DC it’s a given. Here, about 53% of Seattle-area homes had it in 2021, per the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey, and most of the older houses on your tour won’t. You can live without it most years, because the average July high is 77°F and the nights cool off, and a ductless heat pump fixes it for the two hot weeks a year. Termites, on the other hand, come off your list; the wood-destroying organism report here is about moisture, carpenter ants and rot.

Earthquakes are new. Besides local faults like the Seattle Fault, the region sits near the Cascadia Subduction Zone offshore, which can produce a very large, long-shaking quake. Older houses that aren’t bolted to their foundations are the ones that slide, and the retrofit is in the table above. Earthquake coverage is something you add to your homeowners policy or buy separately, and the deductible typically runs 10% to 25% of the coverage on the house, according to the Washington Insurance Commissioner. Get the quote before you close and decide with real numbers.

Weather: milder, grayer, and no humidity

Here’s the number nobody from DC believes: you get more rain than we do. The District averages about 42 inches a year, Seattle about 39. DC gets it in 118 days, a lot of it in summer thunderstorms. Seattle gets it in 156, mostly as drizzle between October and May.

Sources: NOAA 1991 to 2020 climate normals (Reagan National Airport, Sea-Tac Airport for Seattle). Daylight from sunrise-sunset.org.

Seattle is milder in both directions. The average July high is 12 degrees cooler than yours, with no humidity to speak of, and from July through September it almost never rains. In late June the sun doesn’t set until after 9 p.m. The average January low is eight degrees warmer than DC’s, and the ice-and-snow commute mostly doesn’t happen: Seattle gets a few inches of snow most winters, and because the city is built on hills, it shuts down for a day or two when it does, which you’ll find familiar.

The light is the real adjustment. Around the winter solstice, Seattle gets about eight and a half hours of daylight, an hour less than DC, and plenty of those hours are gray. People who move here from the East Coast talk about the dark more than the rain. A good lamp and a winter trip somewhere sunny do a lot of work here. Umbrellas are optional (most locals skip them). Rain jackets are not.

What you won’t miss: August. Also hurricane remnants, derechos, cicadas, and pollen that turns the car yellow. Seattle has an allergy season too, but it’s shorter and the cars stay the color you bought them.

Getting around: less rail, and most people own a car

The average commute in the DC metro is 33.8 minutes, the longest of any city we’ve written about. In the Seattle metro it’s 30 (Census Reporter, ACS 2024). The gain is smaller than it looks, because you’ll probably do more of it in a car.

Be clear-eyed about rail. Metro runs 129 miles with 98 stations on six lines and carries about 675,000 riders on a weekday. Link light rail runs 63 miles with 51 stations and, by Sound Transit’s counts reported this fall, carries more than 160,000 boardings a day. It’s a good system that carries about a quarter as many riders as yours. Since March 28, 2026 the 2 Line crosses Lake Washington, connecting Seattle with Mercer Island, Bellevue and Redmond, and extensions to West Seattle and Ballard are planned for the 2030s (we have opinions about Ballard’s). If living car-free matters to you, the honest advice is to buy within a 15-minute walk of a Link station: Capitol Hill, the U District, Roosevelt, Northgate, Columbia City, Beacon Hill or downtown Bellevue and Redmond on the Eastside. The bus network does more of the work here than it does in DC, and plenty of our Capitol Hill clients use their cars less than once a week. Outside those corridors, you’ll want a car, and most households here have one.

If you’ll drive across the lake, I-90 is free and SR 520 is tolled in both directions: as of October 2026, up to $4.90 at weekday rush hour with a Good To Go pass and $6.90 if they mail you the bill. Your E-ZPass doesn’t work here. Good To Go is the Washington equivalent, and it also covers the SR 99 tunnel under downtown and the express lanes on I-405. One more thing: you’re three hours behind the East Coast now. A 9 a.m. call with the agency is a 6 a.m. call for you, and the markets open at 6:30.

Jobs and schools

If you’re transferring with Amazon (HQ2 to HQ1 is a well-worn path), Microsoft or another big employer, you already know the address. If you’re leaving federal service without a job lined up, here’s the straight version. The DC region’s federal workforce fell from about 375,800 in early 2025 to about 312,500 by mid-2026, the lowest in three decades, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures reported by WJLA. Seattle’s federal presence is small (NOAA, EPA’s regional office, the VA, the military bases), and the job market here tilts hard toward a few very large tech employers that have had a rough few years of their own. By our count, King and Snohomish counties added about 42,000 tech jobs from late 2019 to August 2022, then lost about 29,000 of them by early 2025. (We dug into what that’s doing to Eastside home prices in this post.) Where federal experience lands here: the defense and space cluster (Boeing, Blue Origin in Kent, the contractors around JBLM and Kitsap), the big health systems and research institutes, the Gates Foundation and the nonprofits around it, and the policy and compliance teams inside the tech companies. My advice: get the offer letter before you sign a purchase agreement, and if you’re consulting, read the B&O paragraph above twice.

For schools, if you’re used to the DC lottery and the Montgomery and Fairfax districts being the whole reason a house costs what it does, Seattle is a little less stark. Seattle Public Schools assigns by address, and the Eastside cities have their own districts (Bellevue, Lake Washington for Kirkland and Redmond, Mercer Island, Issaquah and Northshore). Boundaries don’t follow neighborhood names, so check the district’s boundary lookup for the exact address before you offer.

A lot of families moving here rule out Seattle Public Schools on reputation alone and head straight for the Eastside, the way DC families head for Bethesda. I think that’s often a mistake, and we wrote about why Seattle’s schools are better than their reputation. If you’re buying for the long haul, our post on Seattle’s sleeper schools covers the ones we think will improve the most.

Your first 30 days in Washington State

Driver’s license. State law gives you 30 days after you move to get a Washington driver’s license, and you need it before you can register your car here.

Car registration. New residents also have 30 days to register their vehicles in Washington. No emissions test and no safety inspection: Washington ended its emissions program in 2020. In King County the bill includes Sound Transit and transit fees, so expect more than you’re used to paying.

Register to vote. Washington votes entirely by mail, so register at your new address and the ballot comes to you. Then cancel your DC, Maryland or Virginia registration. You also get two senators and a representative with a vote, which some of you will enjoy.

Move the rest of your life. Change your address with your bank, brokerage and employer, and move your doctors when you can. Tell your employer’s payroll team the move date so your DC, Maryland or Virginia withholding stops. If you’re a federal retiree, update your address with OPM and the TSP the same week.

Good To Go pass. If you’ll cross SR 520, use the SR 99 tunnel or the express toll lanes on 405, set up a Good To Go account before your first trip. Pay-by-mail costs $2 more per crossing on 520.

Fall maintenance. Gutters and roof moss are an annual thing here. Gutter cleaning runs about $200 to $500 and roof moss removal about $500 to $800 from Seattle companies. The leaf season is the same as yours, just wetter.

Should you sell your DC place or rent it out?

The District is a decent rental market with a steady supply of tenants who arrive on two-year assignments, and if you bought before 2022 your mortgage rate is an asset. Plenty of people in your spot keep the place, especially if there’s a chance the next administration brings them back.

Before you do, here’s what keeping it means. The homestead deduction and the 10% assessment cap end when the house stops being your principal residence, so the tax bill on a $665k house rises by about $800 right away and can climb faster after that. You’ll need a Basic Business License (the One Family Rental category) to rent it out. DC’s tenant purchase law (TOPA) exempts single-family homes, including a house with one basement apartment and a single condo unit, so you can sell with a tenant in place, with one exception: a tenant who is 62 or older or has a disability and signed a lease before April 2018 keeps the right to buy. You’ll file a DC nonresident return on the rent. The bigger issue is the federal capital gains exclusion on your home sale: a house you rent out long enough stops being your principal residence. The general rule is that you have to have lived there two of the last five years, so you have roughly three years after moving out before that window closes. And you’ll be managing a property from 2,700 miles away in a market where homes are taking 63 days to sell, so if you ever need to get out quickly, you won’t. None of that makes it a bad idea. It means you should run the numbers with a CPA before you decide.

If you sell, the District’s transfer tax is 1.45% on a sale of $400,000 or more, paid by the seller, so about $9,600 on a $665k house, and the buyer pays the same again in recordation tax, which is one reason DC buyers negotiate hard on price. And timing: DC homes are taking about 63 days to sell and Seattle homes about 19, so your DC sale will almost certainly take longer than your Seattle purchase. Offers contingent on selling another house are hard to win on Seattle houses that are drawing multiple offers. Most people in your spot either sell first and rent here for a bit, or line up a bridge loan with a lender who does them. Condos are the exception: King County had 7 months of condo inventory in September, so a condo buyer has more room to negotiate. (Our guide to the main loan types is a decent primer before you call a lender.) One small bonus on the Washington side: the transfer tax here (the real estate excise tax) is paid by the seller, so as a buyer you pay nothing like the recordation tax you paid in DC.

Buy or rent here? If you know where you’ll work and you’ve spent real time in a couple of neighborhoods, I think buying soon makes sense, because buyers have more room now than they did in 2025. If you don’t know the neighborhoods yet, or you don’t know whether the job is permanent, rent for six months to a year, through a winter, and see whether the dark bothers you before you commit. If this is your first house that isn’t attached to another one, our list of first-time buyer mistakes is worth a read even if it isn’t your first house.

FAQ: moving from Washington, DC to Seattle

Disclaimer: This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Tax rules, ballot measures and market numbers change, and costs vary by house. Talk with your own CPA, attorney, inspector and contractor before making decisions.