As Seattle lost 10K Amazon employees, the company added corporate workers in Bellevue

Amazon’s Seattle headcount shrunk significantly over the past few years, while the tech giant steadily added employees in nearby Bellevue.

At its peak in 2020, Amazon employed about 60,000 corporate workers in Seattle, a company spokesperson told KUOW. Today, Amazon has about 50,000 employees in its home city. Amazon attributed the decline to a combination of layoffs and relocations.

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Meanwhile, Amazon has grown to nearly 12,000 corporate employees in Bellevue, where the company says its future growth will be concentrated.

“I think that the Eastside in general has a reputation for being more business friendly, so that's definitely an attraction to invest there,” said Elliott Krivenko, a real estate analyst with CoStar Analytics.

The numbers, which were first reported by the Puget Sound Business Journal, reflect a shift in growth strategy Amazon first signaled in 2019 following a series of political battles with the Seattle City Council. Amazon plans to grow to 25,000 employees on the Eastside, including its critical worldwide retail operations team.

The shift has helped Downtown Bellevue’s commercial real estate market fair better than average for the region, according to Krivenko.

“Downtown Bellevue is still outperforming,” he said. “The vacancy rate is a lot lower than it is elsewhere in the Seattle Metro and there has been quite a bit of leasing of late. The first quarter of 2024 has been the strongest quarter that I've seen since fall of 2020 and would be a stellar quarter anytime in history for that submarket.”

It’s a shift Krivenko expects to accelerate when Bellevue is connected to Seattle via light rail. The East Link Extension from Seattle to Redmond is expected to open in 2025.

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“Once we have that line going across the lake, I think that's going to be the real game changer because then it won't really matter if you choose to work in Bellevue and live in Seattle or vice versa,” he said. “That's a one seat to ride fairly easy to hop on the train and get to one side of the lake or the other.”