Answers · Chicago business licences
How many businesses open in Chicago each month?
The City of Chicago issued 603 new business licences in 30 days, measured 2026-07-29 in dataset r5kz-chrr. 259 of those are event permits and personal credentials rather than a business opening — 43% of the raw count. What is left is 325 qualified openings a month.
The raw licence count is the number most often quoted and it is the wrong one. A one-day event permit and a personal credential both create a licence row, and neither is a business that just opened its doors.
The gap is published here because anyone pulling the file finds it within an hour.
Kova Signals is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the City of Chicago.
How this is measured
- Dataset
- r5kz-chrr
- Publisher
- City of Chicago
- Filter
- Licences issued inside a trailing 30-day window. The 325 figure removes event permits and personal credentials from that raw count; nothing else is filtered out.
- Measured
- 2026-07-29
Caveat. One 30-day window, counted once. Chicago licence volume moves month to month, and no seasonal pattern is published here because none has been measured.
Source
- City of Chicago · business licences · dataset r5kz-chrr
Printed without a link: this site publishes a source URL only where it has checked it. Search the dataset ID on the publisher portal to reach the file.
Opening + Renewal Signal
Opening + Renewal Signal delivers the 325, not the 603, one vendor category at a time. The first delivery is three real records, free, with the government source link on every row.