Chicago New Business License Radar

For POS/payments providers, food and beverage distributors, commercial insurance brokers and local marketing agencies who want to reach a business in its first weeks. One run returns a clean, priced list of new City of Chicago business licenses — restaurants, bars, salons, shops, auto shops — with new-business, new-location and relocation classification. Pay-per-result: $0.01 per license — 100 leads = $1.00. Try it free with Apify's monthly platform credit.

This Actor calls Chicago's own business-license dataset (data.cityofchicago.org, dataset r5kz-chrr, public and keyless) and turns the raw license feed into a clean, priced lead list: which business just got licensed, what kind of business it is, whether it's a brand-new opening or an existing operator adding a location, and where.

Quick start (2 minutes)

1. Open the Input tab (no account or API key needed — the source is public).
2. Use this prefill for new food and liquor licenses in the last two weeks:

{
  "sinceDays": 14,
  "categoryGroups": ["FOOD", "LIQUOR"],
  "openingTypes": ["NEW_BUSINESS"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

3. Click Start. Export the resulting lead list to CSV/JSON, or pull it via API into your CRM or dialer.

Use cases

• POS, payments and merchant-services vendors reaching new restaurants and retailers before they've locked in a provider.
• Food/beverage distributors and commercial insurance brokers prospecting brand-new openings in their delivery or coverage area.
• Local marketing, signage and linen/waste service vendors targeting businesses in their first weeks, when vendor decisions are still open.
• Franchise and territory researchers tracking new-location vs. new-business openings by category and community area.

Run it weekly

1. Set your categoryGroups/openingTypes/geography filters, then click Schedule on the run page (or create one under Schedules in the Apify Console).
2. Run it weekly, or daily with a short sinceDays window (e.g. 7), so each run mostly returns licenses you haven't seen yet.
3. Keep recordId as your dedupe key in your CRM/spreadsheet — it's stable across runs.
4. The City publishes with a 1–2 business day lag (see Limitations), so a weekly cadence with sinceDays: 14 is a safer default than a very tight daily window.

Chicago new business license list, new restaurants opening in Chicago

If you have ever wanted a "Chicago new business license list" or a feed of "new restaurants opening in Chicago" without paging through the City's data portal by hand, this is that list, refreshed on demand:

• New business licenses issued in the last 1–90 days, grouped into food, liquor, retail, personal services (hair/nails/spa/tattoo/fitness), auto, and temporary events.
• New-business vs. new-location vs. relocation classification, built from each account's full license history — a restaurant collecting food, liquor and patio licenses in the same few weeks reads as one opening, not three.
• Businesses only. Individual-type licenses (peddlers, pharmaceutical reps) and home-based businesses are excluded, and every delivered row's legal name is checked for a business-entity suffix (LLC, Inc., Corp., ...) — see Privacy filtering below.

Example input

{
  "sinceDays": 14,
  "categoryGroups": ["FOOD", "LIQUOR"],
  "openingTypes": ["NEW_BUSINESS"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

Example output

Real output from a live run against data.cityofchicago.org on 2026-09-24 — a brand-new restaurant's opening-day license:

{
  "recordId": "3086685-20260922",
  "licenseId": "3086685",
  "accountNumber": "527632",
  "legalName": "Wok the Wave LLC",
  "doingBusinessAs": "MiMi Dao",
  "licenseDescription": "Retail Food Establishment",
  "businessActivity": "Preparation of Food and Dining on Premises With Seating",
  "applicationType": "ISSUE",
  "dateIssued": "2026-09-22",
  "licenseStatus": "AAI",
  "address": "1516 E HARPER CT 1ST FLOOR",
  "city": "CHICAGO", "state": "IL", "zip": "60615",
  "communityAreaName": "HYDE PARK",
  "categoryGroup": "FOOD",
  "openingType": "NEW_BUSINESS",
  "accountFirstLicenseDate": "2026-09-22",
  "daysSinceIssued": 2,
  "sourceUrl": "https://data.cityofchicago.org/d/r5kz-chrr",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-09-24T06:24:07.774Z"
}

No field above is invented — it is a genuine record from the City's dataset. (The full schema has 30 fields; see Output fields below.)

Field	Value
legalName	Wok the Wave LLC
doingBusinessAs	MiMi Dao
licenseDescription	Retail Food Establishment
dateIssued	2026-09-22
address	1516 E HARPER CT 1ST FLOOR
communityAreaName	HYDE PARK
categoryGroup	FOOD
openingType	NEW_BUSINESS
daysSinceIssued	2

Privacy filtering — businesses only, fail-closed

This Actor is built to return B2B leads, not personal data, and it errs toward excluding a row whenever that is ambiguous:

1. Individual-type license categories are dropped outright, whatever the legal name says: Peddler License (including Street Performer and senior variants), Pharmaceutical Representative, and Shared Housing Unit Operator. These are licenses issued to a person, not an entity.
2. Home-based businesses are dropped (business_activity containing "home-based"), even when the legal name carries an entity suffix.
3. Every remaining row's legal_name must end in a recognized business-entity suffix (LLC, PLLC, LLP, LP, Inc., Corp., Co., Ltd., PC, PLC, NFP, LWCA, ...), derived from 7,367 real legal names on the City's own license history. A blank name, or a name that looks like a person's (e.g. "JOHN SMITH", sole proprietors), is dropped, not guessed at.

The honest trade-off: on a real 30-day capture (2026-09-24, 665 raw new-license rows), this filter kept 508 rows (76%) and excluded 24% — 63 individual-type licenses, 33 home-based businesses, and 61 rows whose legal name did not carry a recognizable business suffix. That last group includes some real businesses lost to conservative filtering: sole-proprietor businesses (a legitimate but unincorporated business run under a person's own name), and a small number of rows (well under 1% in our sample) where the City's own legal_name field embeds a "DBA" clause after the entity name (e.g. "RECIPE LLC DBA CACHE") or truncates the suffix. We accept this false-negative rate deliberately: a fail-open filter that occasionally leaked a private individual's name would be worse than under-covering the market.

Input

Field	Default	Meaning
sinceDays	14	Licenses issued in the last 1–90 days
categoryGroups	all	Any of FOOD, LIQUOR, RETAIL, PERSONAL_SERVICES, AUTO, EVENT, OTHER
openingTypes	all	Any of NEW_BUSINESS, NEW_LOCATION, EXISTING_LOCATION, RELOCATION (needs includeChangeOfLocation), TEMPORARY_EVENT
includeChangeOfLocation	false	Also return licenses re-issued because a business moved address
communityAreas	[] (citywide)	Chicago community areas, by name or number
zipCodes	[] (citywide)	5-digit ZIP codes
maxItems	500	Hard cap on licenses delivered and charged this run (newest-issued first)

Output fields

Field	Meaning
recordId, licenseId, licenseNumber, accountNumber, siteNumber	The City's own record and account identifiers
legalName, doingBusinessAs	Legal entity name and trade name
licenseDescription, businessActivity, applicationType	What kind of license, what the business does, and whether it's a new issue (ISSUE) or a location change (C_LOC)
dateIssued, licenseStartDate, expirationDate, applicationCreatedDate	Key dates
licenseStatus, conditionalApproval	Current status and whether it's a conditional approval
address, city, state, zip, ward, communityArea, communityAreaName, neighborhood, latitude, longitude	Location
categoryGroup	Derived: FOOD, LIQUOR, RETAIL, PERSONAL_SERVICES, AUTO, EVENT, or OTHER
openingType	Derived: see the table above; null if it could not be classified
accountFirstLicenseDate, siteFirstLicenseDate	Derived: the earliest license date on record for this account and this site, across its whole history
daysSinceIssued	Derived: days between dateIssued and when this run fetched it
sourceUrl, retrievedAt	The dataset this came from and when it was fetched

Limitations — read before you build automation on this

• New-business classification depends on account history, not a birth-date field. An account is NEW_BUSINESS if its earliest license of any kind was issued within 90 days of this one. A business whose very first Chicago license predates the dataset's practical lookback, or whose licenses are spread further apart than 90 days across a genuine single opening, may classify as EXISTING_LOCATION instead.
• The City publishes with a lag of about 1–2 business days. A sinceDays window of 1 can occasionally return nothing on that account; the Actor treats zero rows across 7+ days as a likely source outage and fails loudly rather than reporting a quiet, wrong success.
• RELOCATION (C_LOC) rows are off by default. Turn on includeChangeOfLocation to include them; they represent an existing business moving, not a fresh opening.
• Fail-closed privacy filtering under-covers real businesses — see Privacy filtering above. This is a deliberate trade-off, not a defect.
• Categories are keyword-derived from license_description/business_activity text, not an official City taxonomy field; an unusual combination could land in OTHER.

Pricing and cost control

Pay-per-event: $0.01 per delivered new business license. Benchmarked against the closest live comparables on the Apify Store: automation-lab/chicago-business-licenses ($0.011), rook-data-tools/new-food-service-license-leads ($0.005), parseforge's Chicago license feed ($0.021), and our own chicago-contract-expiration-radar ($0.015). $0.01 sits in the middle of that range — priced above the bare-feed comparables because of the category grouping and opening-type classification, and below the richer ones because those add no privacy filtering.

• maxItems is a hard cap on both delivered rows and total charge for the run.
• Delivered rows always equal charged rows: if your run's "Maximum cost per run" budget runs out mid-run, the Actor stops, finishes SUCCEEDED, and its status message says exactly how many licenses were delivered and that only those were charged — never a silent under-charge or a failed run.
• If the Actor is not monetized (e.g. running it yourself), every matching license is delivered free.

FAQ

Do I need a City of Chicago account or API key? No. data.cityofchicago.org is public and keyless.

Does this cover suburbs or all of Illinois? No — this is the City of Chicago's own business-license dataset, city limits only.

Why didn't a business I know about show up? Either it licensed outside your sinceDays window, its license type is one of the excluded individual categories, its address reads as home-based, or its legal name didn't carry a recognizable business-entity suffix (see Privacy filtering). Widen sinceDays (up to 90) and re-run.

Can I get sole proprietors too? No, by design. This Actor only delivers rows whose legal name reads as a registered business entity — see Privacy filtering.

Can I get everything since a specific date? sinceDays covers up to 90 days per run; for a longer backfill, run it repeatedly with different windows, or schedule it daily and store the results yourself — recordId is stable, so de-duplication is straightforward.

What does openingType: null mean? The row's account had no other license on record at all (rare) and could not be classified as new-business vs. existing; it is left blank rather than guessed at.

Related Actors

Other data tools from the same developer, built to the same standard: official or public sources, hard cost caps, and honest documentation of limits.

• Federal Register Rule Effective-Date Radar: final federal rules about to take effect, with citations, dockets and urgency.
• Chicago Contract Recompete & Extension Radar: expiring City of Chicago contracts with extension history, for recompete prospecting.
• Bank Branch Closings & Merger Radar (FDIC): new US bank branch closings, openings and mergers from the FDIC.
• NYC FDNY Contractor Leads & Hearing Radar: fresh NYC fire-code summonses routed by remediation trade, with hearing dates.
• RCRA Enforcement Response Leads: new EPA hazardous-waste (RCRA) enforcement actions and penalties, by state.
• Emerging Federal Contractor Radar: companies that just won their first federal contracts, from USAspending.gov.
• Hospital Price Transparency Enforcement Leads: hospitals with recent CMS price transparency warning notices, CAP requests and CMP notices.
• Hospital Ownership Change Radar: hospitals that just changed owner, with buyer, seller and effective date from CMS filings.
• New Healthcare Organization NPI Radar: newly registered healthcare organizations from CMS's weekly NPI file, by provider type.
• County Multifamily Building Permits Surge Radar: U.S. counties where 5+ unit apartment permits are surging year over year.
• Zillow ZIP Code Property Search Scraper: for-sale listings by ZIP code with prices, price cuts and days on Zillow.
• Walmart Category Scraper: product names, prices, was-prices and ratings from Walmart category pages.