Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders in Washington

Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders (AANHPI) are the largest minority racial group in 2015 with 8.7% of Washington’s total population.

• Washington State 2010 Census figures reveal that there are 674,573 Asian and Pacific Islanders, those who identify themselves as one or more other races, comprising 10% of the state’s population. 77.6% of AAPIs live in either King, Pierce or Snohomish Counties.
• AAPIs make up 14.2% of Seattle’s population and 9.4% of Tacoma’s. Based on the 2010 Census data, Chinese (14.0%), Filipino (13.4%), Vietnamese (9.9%), Korean (9.2%), Asian Indian (9.1%) and Japanese (5.2%) are the largest AAPI ethnicities in Washington State.
• The 2010 Census also provided information on detailed Asian groups. For example, the Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese populations each had 1 million or more people.
• Chinese (4.0 million) was the largest detailed Asian group, with 3.3 million people reporting Chinese alone and an additional 700,000 people identifying as both Chinese and one or more additional detailed Asian groups and/or another race. Filipinos (3.4 million), followed by Asian Indians (3.2 million), had the next largest number of people who reported one or more detailed Asian groups and/or another race.
• Among the Asian alone population that only reported one detailed Asian group, the order of the second and third largest groups switched — the Asian Indian (2.8 million) group was the second largest, followed by Filipino (2.6 million). The Chinese alone population remained the largest.
• Among the detailed Asian groups with populations of 1 million or more, the Japanese population had the highest proportion that reported multiple detailed Asian groups and/or another race (41 percent). The Filipino population had the next highest proportion, in which 25 percent of Filipinos reported multiple detailed Asian groups and/or another race.