The Closure Record tracks restaurants, bars, cafés and bakeries that have closed in Seattle and King County. The information is real but scattered — county health filings, city licence data, local reporting — and this collects it in one place where every entry links back to the source it came from.
A closure is published only when a reader can follow a link to something that says so. One source is enough. If we cannot show you where the claim came from, we do not publish it — and there is no “suspected” tier holding the difference.
That rule is enforced in code rather than by habit, and it has teeth: applying it in July 2026 retired about 3,300 entries we could not link to a source that says so — some published on inference alone, many others pointing at a dataset that had since been decommissioned. Every one of them is still recorded and restorable — see corrections.
Today the published record holds 995 closures. Of those, 283 carry a King County or Google Places source, and 714 a press report or a manually entered source. That split counts which kind of source is attached, not which one the publication rule accepted — a record can carry more than one, and the stronger is what publishes it.
King County Public Health— food-establishment closure records and inspection data. The county’s closure feed is a rolling window, not an archive: entries drop off roughly a week after a business is cleared to reopen.
City of Seattle business licences — used to identify and match businesses. Licence data stops at the city line and never publishes a closure on its own.
Local press — a report naming the business. The article is the evidence, and the link is in the record.
Google Places — a verification layer only, never a discovery source. A permanent-closure listing can support a record; it is not used to go looking for closures.
It is not a census. A business missing from this record is not evidence that it is open. It means no source we track has reported a closure we could link to.
Not every entry has a date. Many closures reach us without a reliable date. Rather than invent one we leave it blank, so those records sort last and are absent from year-by-year figures by design. Where a date is an estimate it is labelled as one on the record, and estimated dates are excluded from trend charts.
Coverage follows the county. Seattle plus the King County places the county’s closure feed reports on. Pierce and Snohomish are outside it — a Tacoma or Everett closure is missing because we never looked, not because it did not happen.
Independently run and unfunded. No advertising, no sponsorship, no paid placement. Nothing on this site has been influenced by a business appearing in it, or by one wishing it did not.
The data is published under CC BY 4.0 — free to use, including commercially, with attribution. Bulk exports and a recommended citation format are on Press & Data, and quotable figures are on The Numbers.
Press enquiries, data questions and corrections: press@seabiz.rip.
Know about a closure we have missed, or one we have wrong? Send it — a tip with a link to a source is the most useful thing you can send, because a link is what lets us publish it.