Moving to Seattle from Houston: What to Know (2026 Guide)

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

The trade runs slightly Seattle’s way. In the most recent IRS migration data (tax filings from 2022 to 2023), about 1,170 people moved from the Houston area (Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties) to King County, and about 1,060 went the other way. Harris County alone sent about 860. (Coming from Dallas or Austin instead? We have separate guides for those. The Washington half is the same; the Texas half isn’t.) If you’re one of the people heading north, the two numbers to hold in your head are the price per square foot, which triples, and the insurance bill, which falls by more than half. Most of what follows is about how those two balance out for you.

The money: what your Houston budget buys in Seattle

Sources: home prices, price per square foot and days on market from Redfin’s Houston and Seattle housing market pages (all home types, three months ending October 2026, read November 10, 2026). Rents are average apartment asking rents from Apartments.com, October 2026. Houston property tax computed from the Harris County Tax Office’s 2026 adopted rates for Houston ISD, the City of Houston, Harris County, the flood control, port and hospital districts, the county education department and Houston Community College, with the $140,000 school homestead exemption and the 20% homestead exemptions the city and county offer; the range covers whether the other districts’ optional exemptions apply. Seattle property tax bills from our NWMLS pull of Seattle house sales, October 2025 to September 2026 (5,717 sales). Insurance from NerdWallet’s 2026 averages for a policy with $400,000 of dwelling coverage. Income and estate tax from the Tax Foundation. Rainfall from NOAA’s 1991 to 2020 climate normals.

So the median Seattle home costs about 2.6 times the median Houston home, and about 3.1 times as much per square foot. 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 Houston budget that bought 3,000 square feet in Katy buys about 1,000 here, and the game room is a basement. That gap is smaller if you’re coming from West University, the Heights or Memorial, where prices already run far ahead of the city median.

Here’s the part that softens it. Your tax and insurance bills, added together, will probably go down. A $330k Houston homestead runs about $12,900 to $13,200 a year (roughly $5,000 to $5,300 in property tax and $7,855 in insurance), while a typical Seattle house runs about $10,100 (roughly $8,400 and $1,700). The Seattle insurance figure is an average for $400,000 of dwelling coverage, and a Seattle house usually needs more coverage than that plus a separate earthquake policy, so your real premium will land higher. The gap is still large, because Seattle rarely sees hail or 100-degree days, and it doesn’t get hurricanes. The Seattle premium shows up in the mortgage instead, on an extra $535,000 of price.

Rent is the softer landing. Seattle’s average asking rent is about $930 a month more than Houston’s, a much smaller gap than the house prices. If you don’t know the neighborhoods yet, renting for six months to a year before you buy is cheap insurance, and I’d do it through a winter.

The bigger shock is speed. Houston homes are taking about 54 days to sell, prices are down 5.5% from a year ago, and Redfin counts one offer on the average house. Seattle homes are taking 19 days. You’re used to having time to think, get a second showing, and negotiate repairs during the option period. 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, and Seattle prices are down 2.3% over the past year.

Taxes: leaving Texas, arriving in Washington

If someone told you Washington and Texas are a wash on taxes because neither has an income tax, they’re mostly right. The property tax rate is where the two states look different. Here’s the honest version.

1. Property tax: half the rate on a much bigger number

Inside the City of Houston and Houston ISD, the 2026 adopted rates add up to about 2.14% before exemptions: 0.8421% for the school district, 0.5192% for the city, 0.4175% for Harris County, and the rest for the hospital, flood control and port districts, the county education department and Houston Community College, per the Harris County Tax Office. After the $140,000 school exemption and the 20% homestead exemptions the city and county offer, a $330k house pays about $5,000 to $5,300 a year, depending on which of the smaller districts’ exemptions apply to you (check your current bill). If you live in a municipal utility district out in the suburbs, your rate is different again. Seattle’s rate is about 0.98% of full market value, and the typical house that sold over the past year carried about $8,400. So the rate is less than half and the bill is about $3,000 higher, because the house costs so much more.

Two habits to drop. Texas caps how fast a homestead’s taxable value can rise at 10% a year, and Washington has no cap: 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.) And the annual protest ritual is smaller here. King County has an appeal process, but most people never use it. If you want to check an assessment once you’re here, we wrote about King County assessment errors.

2. Capital gains and the tax on income over $1 million

Washington taxes long-term capital gains at 7% above an annual deduction ($278,000 for 2025, adjusted each year for inflation), and 9.9% on gains over $1 million. Texas has nothing like it. Real estate is exempt. Stock isn’t, including the company stock a lot of energy and tech transplants are sitting on. If you have a big sale coming, talk to your CPA about timing before you establish Washington residency, not after. In March 2026, Washington also passed a 9.9% tax on household income above $1 million, starting with tax year 2028, and voters kept it in November 2026 by rejecting Initiative 645. If your household earns under $1 million a year, it doesn’t touch you.

3. The estate tax is new, and sales tax goes up

Texas has no estate tax. Washington does. For deaths on or after July 1, 2026, the first $3 million is excluded and the rate on the rest runs from 10% to 20%. A paid-down Seattle house plus retirement accounts gets to $3 million faster than people expect, so update your estate plan when you move. Sales tax goes up too: 10.55% in Seattle versus 8.25% in Houston, and you’ll notice it on the car, the furniture and the appliances, which is to say right after you move.

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. Worth a call to a Washington CPA early.

Which Seattle neighborhood is like your Houston neighborhood?

One warning: Seattle neighborhoods change block to block, partly because of the hills and partly because of the age of the houses. Inside the Loop you’ve seen that. Outside it you haven’t. 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: no slab, no brick veneer, and a different list of problems

This is the section I’d read twice. 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 your Houston house is brick veneer on a slab, built after 1980, with central air and a roof that’s been replaced after a storm, almost everything about a Seattle house will be new: a basement or a crawl space, a wood frame that’s been wet for 80 winters, galvanized or clay pipes, and in some houses the oil tank that used to heat the place, buried in the yard. (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.

You already know how to worry about a foundation. Houston’s clay swells when it’s wet and shrinks when it’s dry, and most of you have paid for piers or know someone who has. Seattle’s soil doesn’t do that. What Seattle’s foundations do is sit in water. The problems here are drainage, a wet crawl space, and a side sewer line that’s older than the Interstate system. 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, because in Houston it isn’t optional. 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, the humidity is low and the nights cool off, and a ductless heat pump fixes it for the two hot weeks a year. What you get to stop doing: running the air conditioner eight months a year, and checking the flood map before you check the floor plan. Seattle has its own water questions (a few low-lying areas flood, and steep slopes can slide), and the seller’s disclosure form asks about both.

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: less rain than Houston, on more days

Here’s the number nobody from Houston believes: you get more rain than Seattle does. Houston averages about 52 inches a year. Seattle averages about 39. The difference is how it arrives. Houston gets it on 104 days, a lot of it in downpours that put water in the street. Seattle gets it on 156 days, mostly as drizzle between October and May. Nobody carries an umbrella because it’s rarely raining hard enough to need one.

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

Summer is the trade you’re making, and it’s a good one. The average July high here is 77 degrees, 17 degrees cooler than Houston’s, with low humidity, and from July through September it almost never rains. Houston reaches 90 degrees on more than 100 days in a normal year. In late June the sun here doesn’t set until after 9 p.m. You will not run from your car to your front door in August. Your yard stays green most of the year without a sprinkler system, and if the lawn goes brown in August, it comes back with the October rain. There’s no hurricane season, so no plywood, no generator, and no deciding in the grocery store parking lot whether to evacuate.

Winter is the adjustment. January lows here are about six degrees colder than Houston’s, which isn’t much, and Seattle gets a few inches of snow most winters. Because the city is built on hills, it shuts down for a day or two when it does. The light is the bigger change. Around the solstice, Seattle gets about eight and a half hours of daylight, almost two hours less than Houston, and plenty of those hours are gray. Over a year Seattle gets about 400 fewer hours of sun. A good lamp and a winter trip somewhere sunny do a lot of work here. Rain jackets are not optional.

What you won’t miss: August, hurricane season, mosquitoes, street flooding, and humidity you can wear. What you might: winter days in the 70s, and crawfish season.

Getting around: more rail, fewer freeways

The average commute in the Houston metro is 31.1 minutes. In the Seattle metro it’s 30.0 (Census Reporter, ACS 2024). Call it even. The map is what’s different. Houston spreads in every direction on loops and spokes. Seattle is squeezed between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, with two freeways running north and south and two bridges across the lake, so one stalled car on I-5 is everyone’s problem, and there’s no feeder road to bail out onto.

Transit is where Seattle pulls ahead. METRORail runs 22.7 miles with 39 stations and carries about 36,000 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. 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). Link also runs from downtown to Sea-Tac Airport. If you’ve never lived without a car and want to try, 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. 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 EZ TAG 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 two hours behind Houston now. The markets open at 6:30 a.m.

Jobs and schools

If you’re transferring with Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing or another big employer, you already know the address. If you’re coming without a job, here’s the straight version. Houston runs on energy, the port, NASA and medicine: the Texas Medical Center calls itself the largest medical complex in the world, with more than 120,000 employees. Seattle’s job market 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 Houston experience lands here: medicine and research travel well (UW Medicine, Fred Hutch, Seattle Children’s and the big hospital systems), aerospace does too (Boeing, Blue Origin in Kent), and so does port and logistics work in the south end. Oil and gas mostly doesn’t. There is very little of that industry here, so if that’s your career, line up the remote arrangement or the new field before you move. My advice for everyone else is the same: 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 HISD’s magnet system, or to Katy, Fort Bend and Conroe ISD being the 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 Houston families head for Katy. 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

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 Texas registration.

Move the rest of your life. Change your address with your bank, brokerage and employer, and move your doctors when you can. There’s no state income tax withholding to stop, which is one less form than most transplants file.

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, the way the AC tune-up was there. Gutter cleaning runs about $200 to $500 and roof moss removal about $500 to $800 from Seattle companies.

Should you sell your Houston house or rent it out?

Texas is a landlord-friendly place to own a rental, there’s no state income tax on the rent, and if you bought before 2022 your mortgage rate is probably low enough that the rent covers the payment. Plenty of people in your spot keep the house.

Before you do, here’s what keeping it means. The first thing you lose is the homestead exemption. Texas law lets you keep it through a temporary absence of under two years only if you intend to come back and haven’t made another place your principal residence, and a house in Seattle is another place. On a $330k house, losing the exemptions takes the tax bill from about $5,000 to $5,300 up to about $7,050 a year, and the 10% cap on taxable value goes with it, so the appraisal district can mark the house to market in one step. Insurance on a rental is its own policy, and flood coverage is a separate one on top. Then the federal piece: the capital gains exclusion on your home sale requires that you 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 2,300 miles away, through hurricane season, in a market where homes are taking 54 days to sell and prices are falling, 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, timing matters. Houston homes are taking about 54 days to sell and Seattle homes about 19, so your Houston 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 it won’t come up when you buy.

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, 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 old house, our list of first-time buyer mistakes is worth a read even if it isn’t your first house.

FAQ: moving from Houston 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.