Seattle added zero net off-leash areas in thirteen years.
The last off-leash area (OLA) opened in 2013. Since 2010 the city's population has grown by roughly 208,000 and its parks budget by 37% on an apples-to-apples baseline. The two funded sites, West Seattle Stadium and Othello, are now expected in 2027 and 2028.
Residents per off-leash area keeps climbing.
Dividing Seattle's population by its OLA count: in 2016, the first full year the site's data covers after the 2013 additions, one OLA served about 50,300 residents. In 2025 it served 58,329, a 16% increase with the count fixed at 14. In 2010, with 11 OLAs, the figure was about 55,300; three additions in 2012–13 brought it down, and thirteen years of growth have pushed it back past that point.
No OLA has opened in the twelve full years from 2014 through 2025. SPR's 2023 Expansion Study acknowledges demand "has grown since the pilot program was launched in 1997," and SPR's own enforcement agency told the City Council in 2022 that the shortage pushes owners to run dogs off-leash in regular parks.
Seattle has about a third of its West Coast peers' dog parks per capita.
Trust for Public Land's 2025 ParkScore counts dog parks per 100,000 residents across the 100 largest U.S. cities. Seattle sits below every major West Coast peer; Portland has roughly 3.2× Seattle's per-capita supply. Full per-city detail and counting caveats are on the Peer Cities page.
Counting rules differ: Portland includes unfenced voice-control areas and Vancouver BC includes time-restricted shared-use areas. Normalizing for those differences narrows the gap without closing it. The City's own comparison agrees on Seattle's position: in its June 2022 report to Council (PRR C266465, Bates 00524), the Finance and Administrative Services department put Seattle at 1.9 OLAs per 100,000 residents against Portland's 4.9 and San Francisco's 6.5.
Less than half a percent of Seattle's parkland is legal off-leash.
Per-capita supply is one measure. How the city allocates the park system it already runs is a second. Of Seattle's 6,662 acres of municipal parkland, 30.7 are legal off-leash, about 0.46%. Vancouver BC allocates roughly five times that share and San Francisco about four times.
High park investment, low dog-park density.
Seattle is one of the best-funded municipal park systems in the country, at $418 per resident per year in TPL's investment category. San Francisco spends more ($561) and has roughly 2.8× the dog-park density; Portland spends less ($274) and has 3.2×. Funding is not what separates Seattle from its peers.
The parks budget, and the sliver of it that goes to OLAs.
Seattle Parks and Recreation's budget rose from $156M in 2016 to $506.9M proposed for 2026. During Park District Cycle 1, SPR's 2017 plan put the dedicated OLA line at $103,000–$117,000 a year, costed at $106,000 through 2020. Since 2019 the published budget reports OLAs and P-Patch community gardens as one line, but SPR tracks them as separate Master Projects and released the split in July 2026: the OLA-only figure is $328,345 in 2023, rising to about $1.57M in 2025 as Cycle 2 construction money lands inside it. Of the $3,103,000 for the two new OLAs, roughly $600,000 had been spent by July 2026, all on planning and design. The full breakdown, the per-dog math, and the playground comparison are on the Budget page.
Cycle 1 versus Cycle 2 funding, the playgrounds-for-children versus OLAs-for-dogs comparison, and the per-dog spending calculation now live on the Budget page, in one place.
Most Seattle dogs are unlicensed, and the share is falling.
Part of why the dog population is hard to pin down: Seattle licenses only a small fraction of its dogs. About 26,700 dogs held a current license in the April 2026 Open Data snapshot, which is 7–18% of the 150,000–400,000 population range and about 11% of the site's canonical ~249,000. A 2026 records release from the Seattle Animal Shelter (PRR C264029) shows licenses issued fell about 21% from 24,309 in 2014 to 19,219 in 2025 while the city grew. Asked directly, the Shelter holds no compliance estimate and no dog-population figure of its own, so the share here is ours.
Half of Seattle's OLAs are under an acre.
The four largest sites hold ~79% of total OLA acreage; Magnuson alone holds nearly a third. Seven of the 14 sit below the American Kennel Club (AKC) 1-acre minimum, and the two smallest (Denny at 0.105 and Kinnear at 0.124) are roughly a tenth of an acre. What "too small" means in practice is quantified under size standards in Part II.
Sources, methodology and caveats for this page: Data & Methods.