If you live in Seattle and you’re a millennial and most of your friends are millennials, congratulations: you’ve helped your city reach the top of a nationwide ranking. According to data collected about the population share of different generations in the country’s largest cities, Seattle has the largest percentage of millennials (and one of the lowest shares of Gen Z residents).
Read on for all the details!
Seattle became a major destination for millennials during the 2010s, drawing in tens of thousands of young adults each year. That wave of newcomers helped make Seattle the fastest-growing large city in the country at the time. Many of those people stayed, and today millennials in their 30s and early 40s make up the largest age group in the region.
New data from market research firm Nielsen shows just how strong Seattle’s millennial presence is compared to other big U.S. metro areas, reports Gene Balk of The Seattle Times. Millennials are defined as adults ages 30 to 44 in 2025. In the Seattle metro area, more than 1 million adults fall into that group. That equals about 32% of Seattle’s total adult population, the highest share of millennials among the country’s 30 largest metro areas.
Several other metros also have large millennial populations. Denver is just behind Seattle, followed by Austin, Portland, Chicago, Houston, and Riverside–San Bernardino. Many of these cities, like Seattle, were popular with young, educated workers in the 2010s and built reputations as places with active, youthful cultures.
While Seattle leads the nation in millennials, it ranks much lower for Gen Z. Only about 18% of Seattle’s adult population is Gen Z, placing the area near the bottom among large metros. High rents and rising living costs may be making Seattle less attractive to younger adults. In contrast, San Antonio, Texas, has the highest share of Gen Z adults, at about 23% of its population.
The Seattle metro area includes King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties and has about 3.27 million adults. Nielsen collected survey data across the country between September 2024 and July 2025, including responses from more than 2,900 people in the Seattle region. Note that in the case of the Gen Z data, some in that generation are still under the age of 18 and Nielsen only surveyed adults.