King County's small businesses, by the numbers

We are based in Redmond and work across King County, so we did the homework a local business might want done for its own market. Every number below is from a public source, linked at the end. Establishment counts are employer sites; they exclude one-person businesses without staff.

70,376 employer establishments, most of them small

The Census Bureau's 2023 County Business Patterns count 70,376 employer establishments in King County with 1,305,947 employees. 39,655 of those establishments have fewer than five staff; 12,083 have five to nine; 8,556 have ten to nineteen; 6,076 have twenty to forty-nine. The band from five to forty-nine employees is where an owner can still approve a project personally and already has enquiries worth measuring.

Who is here

• ✦Construction: 6,775 establishments.
• ✦Restaurants: 5,403.
• ✦Management consulting: 2,644. Computer systems design: 2,117.
• ✦Real estate agents and brokers: 2,276.
• ✦Personal care services: 1,664. Automotive repair: 909.
• ✦Offices of lawyers: 1,589. Accounting: 1,218. Architecture and engineering: 1,345.
• ✦Dentists: 1,434. Physicians' offices: 1,206. Mental health practitioners: 645. Physical and occupational therapy: 467. Chiropractors: 404.
• ✦Fitness centers: 422. Child care: 994.

The Eastside is a market on its own

By ZIP code, the five Eastside cities held about 16,100 establishments and 336,500 jobs in 2023: Bellevue 7,305 establishments, Kirkland 3,282, Redmond 2,888, Issaquah 1,766, Sammamish 845. Redmond's own count is inflated by the Microsoft campus in one ZIP, which is why Redmond shows fewer establishments but far more jobs than Kirkland. The City of Redmond reported 10,066 active business endorsements in 2025, a figure that includes home businesses and firms based elsewhere that work in the city.

What is growing and what is not

Washington's Employment Security Department put King County unemployment at 4.9 percent in July 2026, with jobs up 6,700 on the year. Private education and health added 4,400 jobs and leisure and hospitality added 5,700, while construction lost 1,100, information lost 800 and professional and business services lost 700. The Puget Sound Regional Council reports the four-county region lost 12,900 jobs in 2025, the first annual loss outside the pandemic since 2009. Health practices, hospitality and recurring-demand home services are hiring; tech is not.

What local vendors publish about price

An Eastside owner who searches for help finds template websites from $99 to $499, custom websites quoted between $1,500 and $15,000, search retainers from $750 to $5,000 a month, and AI automation builds around $7,500. Several offer a free audit as the way in. We did not find one that publishes a fixed-price, fixed-duration diagnostic that starts from the buyer's own lead and close numbers. That is the gap our $1,500 diagnostic is built for, and, since October 2025, Washington sales tax applies to most of these services, which we show in the quote.