(The Center Square) – The nine-story King County Administration Building in downtown Seattle is reopening to county office workers after a six-year closure prompted by the pandemic.
While the building once housed hundreds of employees, 107 employees from the County Department of Health will move to the Administration Building next month, said Callie Craighead, a spokeswoman for County Executive Girmay Zahilay.
The building, built in 1971, currently only holds the county sobering-up center, which is scheduled to move to another building next year.
“This effort is part of the Executive’s vision to create a sustainable hybrid workplace at King County and bring workers back in office three days a week. The goal is to maintain flexibility while also improving service delivery, collaboration, and innovation,” Craighead told The Center Square.
The county has not released exact numbers for each building, but other workers will be required to be more present in other county facilities downtown starting next month.
Craighead said 16,000 employees are currently working in the office two days a week, depending on space capacity.
She said in September, three days a week in the office will be mandatory for 12,800 employees.
That’s roughly equivalent to around three-fourths of the county’s executive workforce.
Before the Zahilay administration started in late Nov. 2025, approximately 9,000 employees were in the office three days a week, including frontline workers who worked throughout the pandemic, Craighead said.
The return-to-office order has led to some resistance.
Around 75 unionized county workers staged a protest in late April at the county Chinook Building downtown, arguing that they were productive working from home and should not be ordered to return to the office, even on a partial schedule.
The return-to-work order will cost the county money. Agenda material from the King County Metropolitan Council this summer shows that it will cost more than $20 million dollars to create new workspaces for county workers.
The city of Seattle announced in 2024 that it has required workers to come to its office at least three days a week since then, though union rules can relax that requirement to two days a week in some cases.
Downtown Seattle has the highest office vacancy rate in the nation at 38%.
“So any additional weekday foot traffic is certainly welcome news for downtown, for arts & cultural venues, for retail and restaurants. That’s a metric we’d like to see continue to climb,” said James Sido, a spokesman for the Downtown Seattle Association.