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

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

More people make this move than the reverse. In the most recent IRS migration data (tax filings from 2022 to 2023), about 1,290 people moved from the Boston area (Suffolk, Middlesex, Norfolk and Essex counties) to King County, and about 900 went the other way. Middlesex County, which is Cambridge, Somerville and the suburbs to the west, sent about 630 of them, more than Boston’s own county did. The two cities are built on the same things (universities, hospitals, biotech and software), so a lot of this is people changing labs or employers without changing fields. What changes is the housing math, and it mostly changes in your favor.

The money: what your Boston budget buys in Seattle

Sources: home prices, price per square foot and days on market from Redfin’s Boston 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. Boston’s fiscal 2026 residential rate as reported by the Dorchester Reporter; residential exemption from the City of Boston Assessing Department. Seattle property tax bills from our NWMLS pull of Seattle house sales, October 2025 to September 2026 (5,717 sales). Massachusetts income, capital gains, sales, estate and deeds excise rates from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue. Insurance from NerdWallet’s 2026 averages for a policy with $400,000 of dwelling coverage (NerdWallet publishes a statewide figure for Massachusetts and a city figure for Seattle). Snow from NOAA’s 1991 to 2020 climate normals.

So the median price is about the same, within 1%, and Seattle costs about 20% less per square foot. Put differently, the same money buys a bigger place here. If you want 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. The comparison shifts if you’re coming from Cambridge, Brookline or Newton, where prices run well ahead of Boston’s median, or from farther out, where they don’t.

Rent is the big one. Seattle’s average asking rent is about $1,460 a month below Boston’s, which is 41% less. That makes renting for six months to a year before you buy cheap by your standards, and I’d do it through a winter. There’s no September 1 scramble here, either. Leases turn over year-round.

The other difference is speed. Boston homes are taking about 40 days to sell, a week longer than last year, and Redfin counts two offers on the average home. Seattle homes are taking 19 days. On the right Seattle house you don’t get a second showing or a long think, 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 while Boston’s are up 5.8%.

Taxes: leaving Massachusetts, arriving in Washington State

The income tax goes away, the estate tax gets a little friendlier, and two smaller lines get worse. Here’s the honest version.

1. Income tax: a flat 5% becomes zero

Massachusetts taxes wages at a flat 5%, and since 2023 it adds a 4% surtax on income above a threshold that’s $1,107,750 for 2026, per the Department of Revenue. Washington has no income tax on wages at all. A household with $250,000 of taxable income is paying about $12,500 a year to Massachusetts. In Seattle that line is zero. Short-term capital gains, which Massachusetts taxes at 8.5%, aren’t taxed here either.

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.

2. Property tax goes up if you live in the house

Boston’s residential rate for fiscal 2026 is $12.40 per $1,000 of assessed value, up from $11.58 the year before. If you own and live in your home, the residential exemption takes up to $4,354 off the bill, which is why Boston owner-occupants pay less than the rate suggests: about $6,500 a year on an $873k home, or roughly 0.74% of value. (The fiscal 2027 rate gets set in December.) Seattle’s effective rate is about 0.98% of full market value, with no residential exemption, and the typical house that sold here 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 $2,000 a year more. If you want to check an assessment once you’re here, we wrote about King County assessment errors.

3. Sales tax goes up, and the estate tax exemption does too

Seattle’s sales tax is 10.55%, against 6.25% in Massachusetts, and you’ll notice it on the car, the furniture and the appliances, which is to say right after you move. On estates, the news is better than most transplants get. Massachusetts taxes estates of $2 million or more, at rates from 0.8% to 16%. Washington, for deaths on or after July 1, 2026, exempts the first $3 million and taxes the rest from 10% to 20%. So the exemption is a million dollars higher and the rates above it are steeper. Either way, a paid-down house plus retirement accounts gets there faster than people expect, so have a Washington attorney look at your estate plan when 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 Boston neighborhood?

One warning: Seattle neighborhoods change block to block, partly because of the hills and partly because of the age of the houses. Boston 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. The streets, at least, are on a grid. That’s why we start new clients with a learning tour before anyone writes an offer.

Seattle houses: old and wooden like yours, with different problems

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). By Boston standards that’s young. If you’ve owned a unit in one of the roughly 15,000 triple-deckers that went up in and around Boston between 1880 and 1930 (the count is from the Boston Preservation Alliance), you already know what an old wood-frame house asks of you: a basement that’s seen water, wiring from three eras, 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 come from the weather. A Boston house fights freezing: ice dams, frozen pipes, a heating system that has to carry the house through January. A Seattle house fights damp: rot at the sill, moss on the roof, a wet crawl space, and drainage that counts for more than insulation. A couple of things will be familiar, with a twist. About 20% of Massachusetts households still heat with oil, according to the state; in Seattle most houses converted to gas or electric long ago, and the old tank is often still buried in the yard. And your sewer line has a cousin here called the side sewer, which the homeowner owns all the way to the street. 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.

Lead paint works differently here. Massachusetts has its own Lead Law, which requires the removal or control of lead paint in homes where a child under 6 lives. Washington has no state deleading requirement like it. On a house built before 1978 you’ll get the federal lead paint disclosure, and what to do about it is up to you, so if you have small children, test before you renovate. Air conditioning is about like Boston: about 53% of Seattle-area homes had it in 2021, per the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey, most older houses don’t, and with an average July high of 77°F and low humidity you’ll miss it less than you did there. A ductless heat pump handles the two hot weeks a year, and heats the house the rest of the time.

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: an eighth of the snow, and a lot less sun

Here’s the number nobody from Boston believes: you get more rain than Seattle does. Logan averages about 44 inches of precipitation a year, Sea-Tac about 39. The difference is how it arrives. Boston gets it on 128 days, in nor’easters, summer thunderstorms and snow. 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 (Logan Airport, Sea-Tac Airport for Seattle). Daylight from sunrise-sunset.org.

The winter is the trade you’re making, and it’s a good one. The average January low here is 37.7 degrees, about 15 degrees warmer than Boston’s, and Seattle gets about six inches of snow in a normal year, most of it gone in two days. Because the city is built on hills, it shuts down when it does snow, which will strike you as funny. You can give away the snowblower and the roof rake, and nobody saves a parking space with a lawn chair. Summer is a little cooler than yours, with low humidity, and from July through September it almost never rains. In late June the sun doesn’t set until after 9 p.m.

The light is the real adjustment. Seattle gets about 460 fewer hours of sun a year than Boston, and most of that gap is in the winter, when Boston’s cold days are often bright and Seattle’s mild ones are often gray. Around the solstice, Seattle gets about eight and a half hours of daylight, 38 minutes less than Boston. 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: February, nor’easters, shoveling out the car, and humid weeks in July. What you might: a real fall, snow days, and a bright cold morning in January.

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

The average commute in the Boston metro is 31.9 minutes. In the Seattle metro it’s 30.0 (Census Reporter, ACS 2024). About two minutes shorter, and you’ll probably do more of it in a car.

Be clear-eyed about rail. Whatever you think of the T, it’s big: 153 rapid transit stations, and about half a million weekday riders on the subway and the Green Line in the spring of 2026, before you count commuter rail. 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 under a third as many riders as yours. The trains and stations are newer, and it doesn’t yet go to several of the neighborhoods you’d most want to live in. 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 a lot of the work here, 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.

Driving is easier to learn than Boston’s. The streets are a numbered grid, and the hard part is geography: water on both sides, two freeways, and two bridges across the lake, so one stalled car on I-5 is everyone’s problem. I-90 across the lake 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 Boston now. A 9 a.m. call with the East Coast is a 6 a.m. call for you, and the markets open at 6:30.

Jobs and schools

If you’re transferring with Amazon, Microsoft, Google or another employer with offices in both cities, you already know the address. If you’re coming without a job, here’s the straight version. The two economies overlap more than most pairs on our list. Boston has the deeper bench in biotech, hospitals, universities and finance. Seattle has a real life sciences cluster of its own, centered on South Lake Union (Fred Hutch, the University of Washington, the Allen Institute and the companies around them), and a much bigger concentration of large tech employers, which have had a rough few years. 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.) If you’re in biotech, expect fewer employers to choose from than Kendall Square offers. If you’re in finance, Seattle is not a finance town. 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 Boston’s assignment lottery and exam schools, or to Brookline, Newton and Lexington 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 Boston families head for Newton. 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, no safety inspection and no inspection sticker: 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 Massachusetts registration.

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 Massachusetts withholding stops. You’ll file a part-year Massachusetts return for the year you move.

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 oil delivery and the storm windows were there. Gutter cleaning runs about $200 to $500 and roof moss removal about $500 to $800 from Seattle companies.

Should you sell your Boston place or rent it out?

Boston rents are about 70% higher than Seattle’s, so on paper your condo may be the better rental of the two cities, and if you bought before 2022 your mortgage rate is an asset. Plenty of people in your spot keep the place, especially academics and researchers who might come back.

Before you do, here’s what keeping it means. The residential exemption ends when the home stops being your principal residence, which is worth up to $4,354 a year, so the tax bill on an $873k condo goes from about $6,500 to about $10,800. Every rental unit in Boston has to be registered with the city every year by July 1 ($25 the first time, $15 after that, and $300 a month if you’re late). Massachusetts’s security deposit statute, Chapter 186, Section 15B, is unforgiving if you get it wrong: the deposit can’t exceed a month’s rent, it has to sit in a separate interest-bearing account at a Massachusetts bank, the tenant gets a receipt within 30 days, and the penalty for mishandling it can be three times the deposit plus attorney’s fees. If the building predates 1978 and a child under 6 moves in, the Lead Law’s deleading requirement applies to you as the owner. Since August 1, 2025, whoever hires a rental broker pays the broker, so if you list with one, the fee is yours. You’ll file a nonresident Massachusetts return on the rent. The bigger issue is the federal capital gains exclusion on your home sale: a home 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 3,000 miles away. None of that makes it a bad idea. It means you should run the numbers with a CPA, and hire a property manager who knows 15B cold.

If you sell, the Massachusetts deeds excise is $4.56 per $1,000, about $4,000 on an $873k sale, paid by the seller. Timing: Boston homes are taking about 40 days to sell and Seattle homes about 19, so your Boston sale will probably take longer than your Seattle purchase. Offers contingent on selling another home 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.) On the Washington side, the transfer tax (the real estate excise tax) is also 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, 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 detached house after years of condo living, our list of first-time buyer mistakes is worth a read.

FAQ: moving from Boston 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.