Preliminary results from King County’s biennial survey of its homeless population showed the number of people experiencing homelessness grew from 16,868 to 18,365 between 2024 and 2026, a nine percent increase.
The report, a federally mandated Point-in-Time count managed by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), suggests that although the rate of growth has slowed down, there are still thousands more entering homelessness in the Seattle region than exiting it. It also showed the increase was almost entirely driven by the unsheltered population, which rose by 2,000. The number of people living in shelters and transitional housing fell by about 500. Seattle’s numbers aligned with the national trend showing jumps in homelessness in 2023 and 2024. The national Point-in-Time count data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be available later this year.
“This is the first time where we’re really at that point where there are three people who are homeless for every bed available,” said William Towey, associate deputy of strategy at KCRHA.
Towey says the decline in the sheltered population reflected a small decrease in the county’s total shelter capacity, including the August 2025 closure of the 80-unit Mary’s Place family shelter in Bellevue. That facility will eventually be replaced with a new one in Burien. At existing shelters, occupancy rates typically exceed more than 90 percent. The results come after Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson missed her ambitious goal to open 500 units of shelter before the World Cup (she opened 75 units this month, and 228 more are scheduled to open this summer), and as KCRHA is under tremendous pressure from politicians and the public to fix weak internal accounting systems that misplaced millions of dollars.
Towey stressed that the Point-In-Time count didn’t show that homeless service providers are failing, but rather that they don’t have the scale needed to get everyone out of homelessness. To reduce the numbers, he says, the region needs to figure out how to reduce housing costs so fewer people end up homeless in the first place.
KCRHA’s online dashboard shows 10,935 homeless people across the county got housed between April 2025 and March 2026.
How to Count People Who Are Hard to Find
The Point-In-Time count measures how many people are homeless on any given night. This data was collected in a two-week sprint between late January and early February. It’s simply a snapshot, prone to fluctuations and omissions that does not capture the total—and likely far higher—number of people who are homeless at some point in the year.
Before 2022, the county would send hundreds of volunteers to go out in the middle of the night and literally count how many homeless people they saw. But for the last three Point-in-Time count surveys, the KCRHA has used a different method called Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS), which surveys people and then extrapolates a larger population figure based on that sample. This year, volunteers collected about 2,000 surveys in more than 30 collection points across the county.
According to UW sociology professor Zack Almquist, who designed the county’s RDS methodology, the visual counting system has benefits, but also risks invading privacy or undercounting people living in hidden areas like cars or in the woods. Individuals get a $20 preloaded debit card for participating, while families with children get $40.
Almquist argues that his methodology is better than the roaming nighttime counts because homeless people voluntarily participate and help recruit their peers. It’s also an efficient way for surveyors to simultaneously collect demographic information on race, ethnicity, gender, veteran status, disability, and more.
Allegations of Failing Urban Indigenous Communities
But not everyone is as pleased with the RDS methodology as the man who created it. In a statement this week, the Chief Seattle Club (CSC) Executive Director Derrick Belgarde slammed the survey for “serious flaws and an undercount of Native homelessness.”
The count found 4.2 percent of the county’s homeless population were American Indian, Native Alaskan, or Indigenous, a nearly 23 percent decrease from 2024. Since 2017, the percentage of homeless people identifying as Indigenous has fluctuated drastically between 3 percent and 15 percent on the county’s Point-In-Time counts, suggesting a systemic issue in accurately counting urban Indigenous communities. CSC communications director Margaret Faliano says the peer-to-peer, trust-based RDS methodology hampered the ability of volunteer surveyors to reach the Native community.
Native people are even less likely to trust any non-Native person, so they are not going to trust someone when they say, ‘Here, have this gift card to come take a survey and get counted by these non-Native researchers,’ when historically, systemically, researchers, government entities, agencies, and service providers have not served our people,” she said.
In a follow-up email, Almquist said he agreed with CSC’s assertion that the decrease in the number of Native and Indigenous people captured in the survey was not evidence of an actual decline in the number of Indigenous homeless people in the county and said the county needed a dedicated report on urban Indigenous homeless communities.
In an email to The Stranger, KCRHA spokesperson Lisa Edge admitted that “no methodology is perfect,” but added that Point-In-Time count still showed that Native people continue to experience homelessness at disproportionately high rates and need culturally responsive housing and services.
“We have an enormous unmet need.”
The count comes at a precarious time for homelessness services. Providers are anxiously awaiting the results of a $65 million federal grant submitted by KCRHA that funds thousands of units of housing and shelter. The Trump administration has been hostile toward the county’s housing-first strategy, and advocates fear politics could play a role in any approval or denial. Yet even if all the money is awarded, the city and county will still need a lot more resources to begin to turn the tide.
For Alison Eisinger, the executive director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, the results just underscore the scale of the challenge.
“We have an enormous unmet need that can only be met by doing two things: one is ensuring that we maintain the services we have and add to them, and the other is by ensuring that we protect the housing that we have and continue to create it,” Eisinger said.
