Business licenses

About business licenses

Each business in Chicago generally needs a license to operate — and the city issues thousands each year. You can learn about licenses recently issued near you in this section of EveryBlock.

The data, which comes from the Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Licenses, includes the location of the business, the date the license takes effect, the expiration date, and the type of license (from auctioneers to weapons dealers). Note that EveryBlock does not publish business license renewals, only issuances of new licenses and changes to existing licenses.

Note that not all businesses are licensed by the city. See more below.

Source

The data comes from the Business Licenses database provided by the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection. Interested parties may want to refer to detailed descriptions of all business license types. The information is updated every business day, and EveryBlock retrieves new data each night.

Which businesses aren't covered here?

Some businesses don't need a city license, though they might still have to pay city taxes. The Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection provides a list of businesses that might be exempt.

The department also publishes 3 Simple Steps to Obtain a Business License, which gives an overview of the tax, filing, inspection and registration aspects of the process.

For privacy reasons, we at EveryBlock do not publish Chicago business licenses for massage therapists, street performers, and peddlers. Such licenses tend to identify individuals' home addresses. We also do not publish raffles licenses, which are a special type of license only issued to nonprofit organizations. However, all of these licenses are still available for public perusal in the city's official Business Licenses database.