A new report shows Seattle went from the second best city for foreign business investment to eleven in one year.

The June 4 "Investing in America" report from FT-Nikkei gave Seattle a score of 62 out of 100, down from 65 the prior year.

Boston claimed the top spot with a score of 73, leapfrogging last year's winner Tampa. The index evaluates 95 U.S. cities across categories including workforce, business environment, quality of life, and a new "energy resilience" metric.

The slide drew immediate reaction from Seattle's tech community. Kirby Winfield, founder of Seattle venture capital firm Ascend, shared the ranking data on LinkedIn and wrote: "As a Seattle native it kills me to see reports like this."

The decline arrives as a series of policy moves and corporate departures have put Seattle's competitiveness under a microscope. Starbucks announced plans to build a 2,000-employee corporate hub in Nashville. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos moved to Miami in 2023, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz followed, and Zillow co-founder Rich Barton's relocation to Las Vegas was reported by GeekWire on Monday, June 8.

The business climate debate intensified after Mayor Katie Wilson, who identifies as a democratic socialist and is in her first year in office, said at a Seattle University forum in April that concerns about wealthy residents leaving were "super overblown." Wilson later told the New York Times those comments "were not productive in the sense that they caused more harm than good."

Washington's new 9.9% income tax on households earning above $1 million, signed by Gov. Bob Ferguson in March, is set to take effect January 1, 2028. Opponents are collecting signatures to put a repeal initiative on the November ballot, with a July 2 deadline to gather at least 308,911 valid signatures.

Not everyone reads the ranking as a clear indictment. New York placed 28th and San Francisco 33rd, both far below Seattle. And Seattle's score actually rose in the "investment trends" category, which measures foreign and domestic capital attracted in 2025 and annual GDP per capita.

Five days after the ranking published, the City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday, June 9 to impose a year-long moratorium on new data center construction, making Seattle the largest U.S. city to enact such a ban.

The signature-gathering deadline for the income tax repeal initiative falls July 2. Organizers had collected roughly 165,000 of the required 308,911 signatures as of June 4.