🏙️ Chicago Business Licenses Scraper

🚀 Export active and historical Chicago business license records with license holder, address, ward, expiration, and license type in seconds.

The Chicago Business Licenses Scraper extracts records from the City of Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection (BACP) public dataset. Every record includes the license holder name, DBA, address, ward, precinct, police district, license code/description, dates, and geo-coordinates - exported as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

The scraper supports filtering by license status (AAI active, AAC cancelled, REV revoked, INQ in-process and more) and paginates through millions of historical records.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Compliance teams, lead-gen agencies, market researchers, real estate analysts, journalists, civic-tech	Lead generation, B2B prospecting, compliance audits, market analysis, real estate research

📋 What the Chicago Business Licenses Scraper does

• Connects to the official City of Chicago Business Licenses dataset.
• Paginates through every record matching your filters.
• Normalises each record into a flat, analysis-ready row.
• Exports as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML - directly from your Apify dataset.
• Refreshes on demand or on schedule (hourly, daily, weekly).

💡 Why it matters: stop copy-pasting from a portal that paginates 100 records at a time. One click, full dataset, your format.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: account_number, address, application_created_date, application_requirements_complete, application_type, business_activity, business_activity_id, city, conditional_approval, date_issued, doing_business_as_name, expiration_date, id, imageUrl, latitude, legal_name, license_approved_for_issuance, license_code, license_description, license_id, license_number, license_start_date, license_status, license_status_change_date, longitude, payment_date, police_district, precinct, results, scrapedAt, site_number, sourceUrl, state, title, url, ward, ward_precinct, zip_code. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 credit - no credit card required.
2. Open the Chicago Business Licenses Scraper page in Apify Store and click Try for free.
3. Configure the input (see Input section above).
4. Click Start - the run will produce a downloadable dataset.
5. Export as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML, or stream to your destination via integrations.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for 50+ data-export actors.

⚠️ Disclaimer: This is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by City of Chicago Business Licenses. It only collects publicly available data published by the source. Always review the source's terms of use before commercial deployment.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.