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Chicago matched record year-end high $3.2 billion in Property Taxes in TIF accounts on January 1, 2026
By Tom Tresser
A review of the 2025 annual reports of Chicago’s 108 active Tax Increment Financing Districts (TIFs) by researchers with the TIF Illumination Project has revealed some startling facts about local government finance.
The TIF Illumination Project has been tracking and reporting on Chicago’s TIFs since 2013. We believe all residents of the city should know how TIFs remove hundreds of millions of dollars of property taxes annually and prevent them from serving the public.
No other organization does this research. The City of Chicago does not provide this level of analysis.
Our analysis reveals that as of January 1, 2026, there was $3,221,005,472 in property tax revenue collected from Chicago property owners sitting in Chicago’s 108 active TIF accounts. This was the second year in a row where the total TIF fund balance was over $3 billion.
Other findings of our analysis of Chicago’s TIF districts for 2025 include:
Chicago had 108 active TIFs in 2025.
Since the TIF program was created in 1986 Chicago has created 186 TIF districts. A total of 78 TIFs have been closed or terminated. 10 TIFs were set to terminate at the end of 2025 (see our full analysis at www.tifreports.com – free registration required). Since these TIFs were active during 2025 and extracted revenues, they are included in this report. 12 TIFs are scheduled to terminate at the end 0f 2025.
There were no new TIFs created in 2025.
Total Property Tax Increment extraction or removal for 2025 = $1,011,099,488. This is the amount of property taxes dollars removed by Chicago’s TIF districts and diverted from funding local units of government.
Chicago’s 108 active TIFs have collected a total of $10,357,587,243 since they were created.
Chicago’s 78 terminated TIFs removed $4,337,611,873 in property taxes while they were active. These TIFs are no longer in service but their impacts must be included in any historic accounting of the TIFs of Chicago (see full analysis at www.tifreports.com).
Chicago’s TIFs (active and inactive) have removed a grand total of $14,695,199,116 in property taxes from 1986 through 2025. This is the total amount of property tax dollars that Chicago’s TIF Program has removed from serving the public. This is the most accurate total that can be ascertained from available records. There are no TIF annual reports available from 1986 through 1996.
In 2025 the Top Ten TIFs removed a total of $579,225,052 in property taxes. These are the “champions” in terms of removing property tax dollars from public use. The biggest property tax remover in 2025 was the Kinzie Industrial Corridor TIF (#052, created in 1998, due to expire in 2034) which took in $114,199,695. This one TIF has removed a total of $1,018,481,130 in property taxes away from local units of government since it was created in 1998. The only TIF that has outperformed the Kinzie TIF is the LaSalle Central TIF (#147, created in 2006, due to expire in 2030), which has removed a massive total of $1,319,729,471 from public circulation since created.
The prior all-time champion in terms of property tax removal is the now defunct Central Loop TIF (#14, started in 1984 and cancelled in 2008) that collected a total of $986,767,582.
In 2025 the Top Ten TIFs in terms of fund balance were holding $1,658,989,276 in property taxes at the end of the year. The TIF with the largest fund balance was the LaSalle Central TIF, holding $400,438,004.
Total expenditures from Chicago’s TIFs in 2025 was $558,995,448. This is how much all of Chicago’s TIF districts spent in 2025. The biggest spender in 2025 was the Central West TIF (#086, created in 2000, due to expire in 2036) at $44,592,597. $43 million was for “Costs of renovation, rehabilitation, reconstruction, relocation, repair or remodeling of existing public or private building, leasehold improvements, and fixtures within a redevelopment project area.” This is the typical unhelpful language inside the entire TIF program.
A little digging (p. 44 of the 2025 TIF Annual Report) reveals that sum was sent to the Board of Education for improvements to the Nathaniel Dett Elementary School Annex ($34.1 million), the Whitney Young Magnet School ($8 million), and the Mark Skinner Elementary School ($1.3 million).
Our TIF analysis reveals how the TIF program impacted majority minority wards. Here are the TIF totals for wards by racial majority (at least 50% White, Black, or Latinx) from 2021:
No racial majority in Wards 1, 11, 49, 50. No TIFs in Ward 41. We used the ward boundaries in place UP TO the 2023 elections. Wards that are at least 50% Black contributed 46.8% of all the TIF funds sitting in TIF accounts at the end of 2020 ($1,072,292,539 out of the total $2,225,387,244 TIF Balance at the end of 2021). Wards that are at least 50% Black received less TIF expenditures than White wards, even though there are four fewer White than Black majority wards. We believe this disparity continues to the present time.
Total revenues moved OUT of TIFs in 2025 was $745,126,070. This means that 74% of the total amount of property tax dollars extracted by TIFs was THEN moved or distributed in some way. TIF dollars are moved in two ways:
– $128,844,357 was transferred from one TIF to an adjacent TIF. This is called “Porting.”
– The other method of distributing TIF dollars is when the mayor declares a “Surplus.” In these cases, the “surplus” dollars are identified, removed, and distributed to the local units of government in proportion to the percentage of property tax dollars those units derive from the property tax collection process. In 2025 that amount was $616,281,713. Chicago mayors historically use this “surplus” to balance their annual budgets.
Mayor Johnson has declared the biggest such “surplus” in recent history. We expect he will do so again in formulating Chicago’s 2027 budget.
The TIF Illumination Project looked at the TIFs carrying debt and paying financing costs associated with Chicago’s TIF districts. In 2025 three TIFs used property taxes to pay a total of $56,438,268 to the Amalgamated Bank of Chicago and the Zions Bank.
In 2025 the Department of Planning and Development took $17,091,097 for administrative costs from the total flow of TIF dollars. This might be called “skimming from the skim.”
2025 GRAPHICS AND DATA VISUALIZATION
The TIF Illumination Project is supervised by Tom Tresser. Tom is a long-time civic educator and public defender in Chicago. He was the co-founder of the CivicLab with Benjamin Sugar. The CivicLab operated a co-working/maker space for two years in the West Loop and closed on June 30, 2015 (www.civiclab.us). In 2008 Tom was a co-founder of Protect Our Parks which sued to stop the privatization of Lincoln Park ( www.wesavedlincolnpark.org). In 2009 he was a co-organizer of No Games Chicago which worked to defeat the bid for the 2016 Olympics (www.nogameschicago.com). He curated and published “Chicago Is Not Broke. Funding the City We Deserve” in July of 2016 (www.wearenotbroke.org). In May of 2017 he co-founded The POWER Institute (People Organizing to Win, Engage & Resist) with Jonathan Peck (www.powerinstitute.us). He is the author of No Games Chicago – How A Small Group of Citizens Derailed the City’s 2016 Olympic Bid from Routledge Press (https://nogameschicagobook.com). He can be reached at 312-804-3230, [email protected].
The 2025 TIF data was harvested and visualized by Will Fineberg. Born and raised in Chicago, Will has a genuine commitment to addressing injustices in his community. Will’s passion for environmental issues strongly influences his dedication to creating positive change. Drawing on his Computer Science and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) backgrounds, Will continues to develop new data visualizations and geospatial solutions to make sense of the world around him. Will currently works for Arizona Public Service as a GIS Support Technician within the Forestry department, where he supports his team with custom Esri ArcGIS Online work-tracking systems, Python scripting, and data management.
The TIF Illumination Project asserts that TIFs are corrupting and racist and has documented a wide variety of public policy problems and harms they visit to our city and communities. For a complete list of these issues, visit www.tifreports.com (free registration required to access the 2025 results) and our online petition at www.endtifsnow.org.
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