Your tax dollars, your right to know
chicago.fyi turns the City of Chicago's official open data — 33 million+ records — into plain-English answers anyone can get in seconds. No SQL, no data portal spelunking, no paywall.
How it works
Chicago publishes an extraordinary amount of public data: every crime report since 2001, every building permit, every 311 complaint, every restaurant inspection, every city salary and contract. It's all free — but it lives in a database interface built for analysts, not neighbors.
chicago.fyi sits on top of that portal. When you ask a question, we query the official datasets live, show the answer, and cite the exact source — so you can verify everything yourself. Nothing is scraped, cached stale, or editorialized: if the city's number changes, ours does too.
The sources
- Crimes — 2001 to Present~8,588,745 rows · updated dailyofficial source ↗
- Building Permits~840,526 rows · updated dailyofficial source ↗
- Business Licenses~1,200,530 rows · updated dailyofficial source ↗
- Food Inspections~312,832 rows · updated weeklyofficial source ↗
- 311 Service Requests~14,217,117 rows · updated near real-timeofficial source ↗
- Towed Vehicles~4,808 rows · updated multiple times daily (rolling 90 days)official source ↗
- Employee Salaries~31,814 rows · updated periodicallyofficial source ↗
- City Contracts~185,727 rows · updated dailyofficial source ↗
- Building Violations~2,017,313 rows · updated dailyofficial source ↗
- Traffic Crashes~1,072,550 rows · updated dailyofficial source ↗
- Affordable Rental Housing~598 rows · updated occasionallyofficial source ↗
- Registered Lobbyists~11,956 rows · updated dailyofficial source ↗
- CTA Daily Ridership~9,251 rows · updated monthly (about a month behind)official source ↗
- Speed Camera Violations~486,786 rows · updated dailyofficial source ↗
- Red Light Camera Violations~1,142,478 rows · updated dailyofficial source ↗
- Divvy Stations~1,166 rows · updated liveofficial source ↗
- Vacant & Abandoned Building Violations~5,012 rows · updated monthlyofficial source ↗
- Cook County Parcel Sales~2,661,662 rows · updated monthlyofficial source ↗
Common questions
- Where does chicago.fyi's data come from?
- Every figure comes live from the City of Chicago Data Portal (data.cityofchicago.org) and the Cook County Data Catalog (datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov) — the official open-data publications of those governments. We don't maintain our own copy of the data; we query the source and cite the exact dataset on every page.
- Is chicago.fyi affiliated with the City of Chicago?
- No. chicago.fyi is an independent, free civic tool. The data is the city's; the interface, the plain-English answers, and any mistakes in presentation are ours.
- How fresh are the numbers?
- Pages refresh from the source at least hourly. The underlying datasets update on the city's schedule — most daily, some (like 311 and towed vehicles) near real time, a few monthly. Every dataset page states its update cadence.
- Can I use or republish what I find here?
- Yes. The underlying records are public data. If you cite a number, please credit the named official dataset (and a link to chicago.fyi is appreciated). For raw access, every page links to the source on the city's portal, and RSS feeds are available for the most-watched data.
- Is this legal, engineering, or financial advice?
- No. chicago.fyi is informational only. Public records can contain errors, and figures reflect what agencies report, not independent verification.