Illinois New Business Leads: new Chicago business licenses (daily)

Get brand-new Chicago business licenses from the official City of Chicago Business Affairs and Consumer Protection (BACP) dataset on data.cityofchicago.org, updated daily. Every row is a business that just got licensed to operate in Chicago: home repair contractors, restaurants, retail, pop-ups, tobacco, and more.

In our last 30-day test run this returned 455 new licensed business entities (out of 617 new licenses; the rest were individuals and are dropped).

Each result has the business name, DBA, license type and business activity, issue date, license term, ZIP, ward, community area (neighborhood) and business address.

No browser, no proxies, no login. Runs take seconds.

Who uses this

• Suppliers and wholesalers (food service, POS, signage, insurance) reaching new Chicago restaurants and shops.
• Contractor-focused sellers filtering home repair licenses.
• Lead-gen agencies, B2B SaaS, banks, payroll and accounting firms building fresh Chicago lists by neighborhood or ZIP.
• Researchers tracking new business openings by community area.

Privacy by design

• Businesses only. Licenses held by individuals (no LLC, Inc, Corp... in the legal name) are dropped.
• No owner names, emails or phone numbers.
• Apartment-style addresses are withheld.

Input

Field	What it does	Default
withinDays	Issued in the last N days	30
dateFrom / dateTo	Exact date window	none
newLicensesOnly	Skip renewals and changes	true
licenseTypes	License type or activity contains, e.g. home repair, food	none
zipCodes	ZIP prefixes	none
communityAreas	e.g. LOOP, WEST TOWN	none
keywords	Name contains	none
maxResults	Cap	100

Output (example)

{
  "businessName": "VENTURES ENDURANCE EVENTS, LLC", "licenseType": "Pop-Up Retail User",
  "businessActivity": "Organizer of Event with Retail Vendors (1-5 Day Show)", "applicationType": "New license",
  "dateIssued": "2026-10-23", "expirationDate": "2026-11-01"
}

Pricing

$2 per 1,000 results (pay per result), plus a tiny per-run start fee.

Run it on a schedule

Schedule it daily or weekly and send new licenses to Google Sheets, HubSpot, Slack or email with Apify integrations. It also works from AI assistants through the Apify MCP server.

FAQ

Is this legal to use? Yes. The City of Chicago publishes this dataset on its open data portal for public reuse.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by the City of Chicago.

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