Businesses Snapshot for My Data sample

* For example: Most Chicago business licenses are active for two years. If Acme Example's license start date is April 7, 2020, the license's expiration date is April 6, 2022, and the license is not renewed to have a new license period start on April 7, 2022, it will be counted as active in 2020 and 2021.

The data for the current year is subject to change as new businesses are licensed. Our license data is updated every weekday.

Data notes

• Not all businesses are required to have a license from the City of Chicago (this includes some financial services and banks, cannabis businesses, and in-home daycares)
• This dataset currently includes temporary (popup, festival) licenses.
• The "Outside Chicago" column counts the number of businesses that are headquartered outside the City of Chicago and have a Chicago business license.
• Analyze 2020 and 2021 data carefully - many, if not most, business licenses were automatically extended or renewed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and this created some overlap so it's possible there is double counting. (BACP issued this notice on July 2, 2021, advising business owners with automatically extended or renewed licenses that they needed to manually renew their license by July 15, 2021.)
• Some business licenses have erroneous data that excludes this from this count: One error we found was that some licenses have a start date that's after their expiration date (however, this is a minor issue as it affected only 90 licenses, as of April 7, 2022, that expired between 2020 and 2022).