Moving to Seattle: How to Ship Your Belongings

The numbers are more interesting than the cliché. NOAA's climate normals record measurable precipitation at Sea-Tac on about 156 days a year, and total annual rainfall of only about 39 inches. Boston gets 44. Atlanta gets 50. Seattle's rain is frequent and light, not rare and heavy.

The seasonal shape matters more than the annual total. November is the wettest month at roughly 6.3 inches, with January and December close behind at 5.8 and 5.7. July averages 0.6 inches, which is why summer here converts people.

Here is why that is specifically a shipping problem rather than a weather complaint. Corrugated cardboard does not need a downpour to fail. Sustained contact with damp is enough: a wet step, a puddled entryway, an hour of drizzle while you're at work. The board softens and the seams give. A box that would sit on a Phoenix doorstep all summer will not survive a Seattle October on one.

So the rule is simple. Between roughly October and March, do not plan a delivery that ends outdoors. That means a leasing office, a package room, a locker, or a carrier hold location. Not a step, not a shared entry, and not "the driver will find somewhere."

Package theft points the same direction. Indoors and signed for beats left and hoped for, in any month.

Ship to somewhere with a roof and a signature. Track it from drop-off to delivery and collect it dry. A wet box is a solved problem, not a Seattle rite of passage.

Seattle winters are wet, not cold, and the gap between those two things is where people over-pack.

Normal January highs run around 48°F with lows around 38°F, and average annual snowfall is roughly 6 inches. Chicago gets about 38. Both figures come from the same NOAA normals.

What that means: heavy parkas, snow boots, ice scrapers and serious cold-weather gear are mostly dead weight here. A good waterproof shell, layers, and shoes you don't mind soaking will cover most of the year.

What it does not mean: Seattle is dark. The winter problem is grey and damp stretched over months, and that affects what you want around you more than what you want on you. Lamps, rugs, the things that make an apartment feel warm. Those are worth the box.

For the ship-versus-rebuy decision, bulky winter gear is the easiest category to cut. It is expensive to ship, expensive to store in a small apartment, and cheap to buy locally in the unlikely event you need it. If you're arriving from somewhere genuinely cold, the Chicago guide is the comparison: that's where you keep the parka.

• Coming from Los Angeles. You likely own plenty of sun gear and nothing waterproof. Ship a fraction of the first, and budget for a shell and shoes you don't mind soaking before November. The Los Angeles guide covers the I-5 drive and what belongs in the car.
• Coming from San Francisco. Your Bay Area layers already work here. What changes is the dark, so ship the lamps and rugs you'd otherwise leave behind. The San Francisco guide covers the same tech move with a different climate problem.
• Coming from New York. You're leaving a city where you never needed a car for one where, east of the lake, you probably will. Pick the address by commute before you ship anything. The New York guide covers the opposite-coast move.

A large share of people who say they're moving to Seattle are landing on the other side of Lake Washington, and that is not a technicality when you're printing a label.

The Eastside is not a footnote to suburbia. Amazon now employs about 49,000 people in Seattle, down from roughly 60,000 in 2020, while its Bellevue headcount has grown to about 15,000 against a stated commitment of 25,000 jobs. Microsoft's Redmond campus employs more than 47,000 on its own, with over 50,000 across the wider Seattle region.

So the question before you ship anything is not which Seattle neighborhood. It's which side of the lake. Bellevue, Redmond and Kirkland are separate cities with their own zip codes, their own apartment stock, and very different commutes.

Say it plainly: confirm your address and your building's receiving arrangement before you print a label. A box sent to a Capitol Hill apartment you didn't take is a genuinely painful error to unwind from two states away.

One thing that changes the calculus: Sound Transit's 2 Line opened across Lake Washington on March 28, 2026, connecting the Eastside to downtown Seattle by light rail for the first time. Sound Transit puts downtown Seattle to Redmond at about 40 minutes, with trains roughly every eight minutes at peak. An Eastside address is less of a compromise than it was two years ago.

More Seattle arrivals than you'd expect are moving on somebody else's budget, and that changes the question from what's cheapest to what you can document.

Many large Seattle-area employers offer relocation support, usually as either a lump sum or a managed package administered through a relocation company. Terms vary by employer, by level, and by offer, and they are almost never published. Read your own offer letter rather than a forum.

The practical point for a page about shipping: an itemized shipping receipt is a clean expense line. A shipment produces a single dated invoice with a from address, a to address, and a price. A five-day drive produces a shoebox of fuel and motel receipts and a lot of hours you can't invoice. Managed relocation programs commonly require itemized receipts above a fairly low threshold, which is one more argument for a documented shipment over ad-hoc costs.

One tax note, and then we'll stop, because we are not tax advisers. The moving-expense deduction and the exclusion for employer-paid moving costs now apply only to active-duty members of the Armed Forces moving on a permanent change of station, and to employees of the intelligence community. That was a 2017 change and it was made permanent by the 2025 tax law. For everyone else, an employer's relocation payment is generally taxable income. IRS Topic No. 455 has the current position. Check with your employer or a tax professional for your own situation.

Get a quote you can forward. Price your boxes and you have a number for your relocation form before you've packed a thing.

Seattle is genuinely steep, and not in a charming way when you're carrying a box. Grades in the low twenties percent show up on residential blocks in Queen Anne and Capitol Hill. Carrying boxes uphill from wherever you managed to park is not a hypothetical here.

Much of the dense rental stock sits in Restricted Parking Zones, where a vehicle without a zone permit is typically limited to two hours during posted hours, commonly 7am to 6pm on weekdays. Some zones run four hours. Some don't allow it at all. The sign on the block is the rule.

If you do bring a truck, SDOT issues a Temporary No Parking permit to reserve curb space. Apply at least 24 hours ahead, and note that signs are not installed or removed on weekends or holidays, which quietly rules out a lot of Saturday moves.

The alternative is the whole point of this page. A delivery needs no permit, no signs, no two-hour window, and no reversing down a hill you can't see the bottom of.