As far as I can tell from my reading, a common method for determining a time series' trend is to smooth the series, perhaps in an iterated fashion, as in: PakistanA Pakistan SBP paper. In the Seasonal Adjustment Methodology section, it describes how X-12 ARIMA does it, though they also use a seasonal factor which perhaps you could also use or perhaps you could simply ignore.f
Other links might include A Bank of England web page and A US Census Bureau paper (pages 8-12).