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Chicago Office of Inspector General

Chicago TIF Districts: Map & Fund Balances

Home > Information Portal > City Finance Dashboards > Chicago TIF Districts: Map & Fund Balances

What will you find here? 

Many new, large developments in the City are funded by Tax Increment Financing (TIF). A TIF district is an area of Chicago in which a portion of property taxes from the district are reserved for redevelopment projects within the district. This interactive map shows all Chicago TIF districts as well as the fund balances, surplus, and debt obligation for each fund. Important definitions include the following: 

  • Fund Balance is defined as the sum of the end-of-year amount of debt obligations, surplus, and project costs. 
  • Surplus is defined as excess money in the fund that must be redistributed to residents in taxing districts. 

Some questions that can be answered by data in this dashboard are: 

  • What is the average balance for TIF districts on the South Side? 
  • Which ward has the highest average surplus? 
  • Which district has the highest debt obligations in 2018? 

Data sources 

This dashboard pulls data from the Chicago Data Portal. The Data Portal provides a dataset covering all TIF districts from 2017 and later. Details about how this dataset is used in the dashboard can be found here. Data for earlier years can be found in Annual Reports for individual TIF districts, but not in a compiled dataset. Only data from the compiled dataset covering 2017 and later are displayed here. Data on TIF districts is reported and updated on an annual basis. When a TIF district has no data for a year, it means the TIF district either ended before or began after that year. Information about individual TIF districts includes their designation years and expiration years.