Philly311 Service Requests - City Service & Response Data

Every non-emergency service request a Philadelphia resident has filed with the City, 5,942,159 of them, from 2014 through today.

Refuse and recycling, street light outages, potholes, illegal dumping, graffiti, abandoned vehicles, vacant lots, tree problems, property maintenance, and the large Information Request stream that accounts for more than half the corpus.

Closed   5,844,270
Open        97,889

Low cost

From $0.00005 per record, down to $0.00003 at Gold Pay-per-event: you are charged per record delivered, and nothing for the query.

What you get

Field	Meaning
requestId	The request
serviceName / serviceType / serviceCode	What was asked for - 140 service types, Information Request 3,339,272 / Abandoned Vehicle 275,788 / Illegal Dumping 240,415 / Rubbish Collection 231,202 / Graffiti Removal 151,002 / Street Light Outage 130,248
agency	Who handles it - Philly311 Contact Center 1,786,438 / Streets Department 1,525,925 / License & Inspections 862,279 / Police Department 387,540 and 64 more
requestedDate / updatedDate / closedDate	The lifecycle, to the second at the source
expectedDate	The promised completion date (38.3% of requests)
status / statusNotes	Closed / Open, with the free-text note (Question Answered, Inspected, ) on 65.7%
address / zip / latitude / longitude	Where, when the citizen supplied it
serviceNotice / mediaUrl	The service notice, and a photo where one was attached

Modes

• rows (default) - requests matching your filters.
• aggregate - one count row per group: by service name, service type, agency or status.

Example inputs

Potholes reported this week - serviceType is a substring match; recentDays keeps only the last N days.

{ "serviceType": "Pothole Repair", "recentDays": 7 }

Street lights still out - service matches the service name and status is Closed or Open.

{ "service": "Street Light Outage", "status": "Open", "maxResults": 25 }

A neighbourhood's graffiti reports - zip is a prefix match; it is present on 43% of requests, so this answers over the geolocated subset.

{ "serviceType": "Graffiti Removal", "zip": "19132", "maxResults": 25 }

Open versus closed - one count per status.

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

Two thirds of these requests have no location

This is the thing to know before you build on the address fields:

Field	Populated
requestedDate / updatedDate	100% / 100%
serviceName / serviceType / agency	100% / 100% / 100%
closedDate	98.4%
statusNotes	65.7%
address	46.4%
latitude / longitude	45.0%
zip	43.1%
expectedDate	38.3%

That is a property of how the City runs 311, not a defect in this actor. A large share of requests are citywide questions - "Information Request" alone is 56% of the corpus - which have no property attached. So a query for "potholes in ZIP 19132" is answering over the geolocated ~45% of requests, and it will undercount. Nothing here presents that subset as the whole.

The other Philly311 table is dead

A second, similarly-named service, philly311__public_cases, is still published and holds 4,219,410 rows. It is frozen at 2023-04-12 - an earlier and smaller slice of the same data, abandoned in place when the City moved.

It is dangerous precisely because it looks alive: its own metadata does not flag it, and a query against it for the last two years returns nothing rather than an error. This actor reads the live table, which carries 5,942,159 requests through this week and adds a serviceType column the old one lacks.

Source

Counts below are a live snapshot - the layer is edited continuously, so exact figures move between reads. The order of magnitude and the ratios are stable.

City of Philadelphia, published on the City's ArcGIS open-data service as PUBLIC_CASES_FC - public open data, no login and no key. Requests range from 2014-01-01 to the current day.

Example output

One request - service=Miscellaneous, status=Open returns records like this one:

{
  "platform": "philly-311",
  "source": "philadelphia-311-service-requests",
  "mode": "rows",
  "groupKey": "",
  "groupCount": "",
  "groupBy": "",
  "requestId": "19953928",
  "status": "Open",
  "statusNotes": "",
  "serviceName": "Miscellaneous",
  "serviceType": "Miscellaneous",
  "serviceCode": "SR-MI01",
  "agency": "Philly311 Contact Center",
  "serviceNotice": "",
  "requestedDate": "2026-09-22",
  "updatedDate": "2026-09-22",
  "expectedDate": "",
  "closedDate": "",
  "address": "",
  "zip": "",
  "latitude": "",
  "longitude": "",
  "mediaUrl": "",
  "sourceUpdatedAt": "2026-09-23"
}

mode=aggregate, groupBy=status - one row per group:

Closed   5,844,270
Open        97,889

Which services dominate - mode=aggregate, groupBy=serviceType:

Information Request         3,339,272
Abandoned Vehicle             275,788
Illegal Dumping               240,415
Rubbish Collection            231,202
Graffiti Removal              151,002
Street Light Outage           130,248

Who does the work - mode=aggregate, groupBy=agency:

Philly311 Contact Center      1,786,438
Streets Department            1,525,925
License & Inspections           862,279
Police Department               387,540
Community Life Improvement      248,078

Output

Every record carries the same key set regardless of mode - the request fields plus the aggregate columns (groupKey, groupCount, groupBy), which are "" outside aggregate mode. Every record carries sourceUpdatedAt, the date the City last edited the layer.

Related actors

• Philadelphia L&I Violations - the code violations and inspections that many of these requests turn into.
• Philadelphia Building Permits - permits for the construction work residents complain about.