Chicago Ordinance Violations

Every ordinance-violation citation heard by Chicago's Department of Administrative Hearings - the docket, the cited address and ward, the violation code, the respondent, the hearing outcome, the fine imposed and the administrative costs.

Low cost

Ordinance-violation records: from $0.00005 per record, down to $0.00003 at Gold.

What you get

• violationId, docketNumber, novNumber - the case and notice keys
• address, streetNumber, streetDirection, streetName, streetType, ward
• violationCode, violationDescription - the violation code (mostly numeric, some with a suffix such as 001000FR) and the ordinance text
• violationDate, dateSuspect - the violation date and a flag when the city's date is not a real date
• hearingDate, caseDisposition
• imposedFine, adminCosts - dollars
• respondents - the cited party name(s), as published
• issuingDepartment - "Buildings" on every row in this extract
• lastModifiedDate - the city's real change stamp, usable for daily or weekly deltas via updatedSince
• latitude, longitude

Examples

The 50 most recently modified citations:

{ "mode": "rows", "maxResults": 50 }

One ward:

{ "ward": 27, "maxResults": 100 }

One address:

{ "address": "543 N LAWNDALE", "maxResults": 50 }

One violation code:

{ "violationCode": "061014", "maxResults": 100 }

A code family (prefix match):

{ "violationCode": "0610", "maxResults": 200 }

Liable cases with a fine above $10,000:

{ "disposition": "Liable", "minFine": 10000, "maxResults": 100 }

Hearings scheduled in a window (future hearing dates are included):

{ "hearingFrom": "2026-11-01", "hearingTo": "2027-02-28", "maxResults": 200 }

Everything the city changed since a date - a delta pull:

{ "updatedSince": "2026-10-20", "maxResults": 500 }

Case-level view of one ward - one row per docket and hearing date, each fine counted once:

{ "mode": "cases", "ward": 27, "maxResults": 200 }

Respondent search:

{ "respondent": "HOMAN", "maxResults": 50 }

Citations by ward:

{ "mode": "aggregate", "groupBy": "ward" }

Citations by year:

{ "mode": "aggregate", "groupBy": "year" }

Coverage and honest limits

• 824,745 citations measured 2026-10-28 (city dataset last updated 2026-10-28; newest change stamp in the data is 2026-10-27).
• 🔴 This is not the Chicago building-violations dataset. The city runs two separate regimes: this corpus is 6br9-quuz (ordinance violations heard by the Department of Administrative Hearings). Building-code violations (22u3-xenr, 2.0M rows) are published separately and are a different corpus - see Related below.
• One row is one citation. A single case can carry several citations (one per violation code); they share a docketNumber but have different violationIds. Counting rows is not counting cases. 119 citations carry no docket number (and no hearing date), so they appear in rows mode but in neither mode=cases nor the docket-level view.
• caseDisposition is blank on 18,377 rows - no hearing outcome recorded yet, not "not liable". Dispositions in the corpus (2026-10-28): Liable 291,307 / Non-Suit 255,245 / Default 116,599 / Not Liable 106,562 / Continuance 31,360 / Adjudication Performance / Other 4,238 / Dismissed Without Prejudice 664 / Judgment Vacated 393.
• 🔴 Some violationDate values are not dates. 94 rows sit after 2027 and a handful carry impossible years (4201, 5112, 6111); 89 rows have no violation date at all. Those rows are returned with dateSuspect=true, and the year aggregate buckets every one of them as suspect so the totals still add up to the corpus.
• 🔴 imposedFine and adminCosts are hearing-level values repeated on every citation row of that hearing. Docket 12BT01656A, for example, has 130 citation rows and every one of them carries imposed_fine = 5000. A docket heard more than once carries a different fine and disposition per hearing, so there is no dollar aggregate in this actor: summing the column multiplies each hearing's fine by its citation count. mode=cases returns one row per docket and hearing date - that hearing's fine counted once, with citationCount saying how many citations it folds in. Within one hearing the city can still cite several properties and occasionally carry conflicting outcomes: address, ward, caseDisposition and imposedFine are then the maximum value in that hearing, and addressCount, wardCount, dispositionVariants and fineVariants say how many distinct values were folded (for example docket 09BS09261A on 2015-12-04 carries 36 Continuance and 36 Default citations). Filters are applied to the individual citations before the fold, so a filtered mode=cases counts only the citations that matched.
• imposedFine is the fine the hearing imposed, not the amount collected. The source publishes no payment or collection column.
• violationCode has 1,260 distinct values in the corpus; groupBy=violationCode returns all of them (billed per aggregate row).
• groupBy=ward returns 52 groups: wards 1-50, plus (blank) (2,919 rows) and 0 (71 rows) as the city publishes them.
• issuingDepartment is "Buildings" on every row - it is kept for compatibility, not as a useful dimension.
• respondents is the cited party as the city publishes it (public administrative record). It is not a person-level profile and must not be used for consumer screening.

Related

Also available in this account: Chicago Building Violations (22u3-xenr, 2.0M building-code violations), Chicago Building Permits and Chicago Business Licenses.