Where the numbers come from

Everything on this site comes from two sets of City records. Both are below, so you can check our work.

Tickets

In September 2026 the Department of Streets and Sanitation answered our Freedom of Information Act request with every citation it had issued in 2026 under MCC 7-28-710, the section against keeping garbage in a way that feeds or shelters rats. That's 8,974 citations from January 2 to September 16.

108 of them, or 1.2%, were written on a Saturday or Sunday.
93% were written between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m., and none after 9 p.m.
A typical weekend produced 2 citations citywide. A typical weekday produced 46. (These are medians.)
Weekend tickets held up at hearing as well as weekday ones did: 84% of the 57 that have been decided ended in a liable or default finding, compared with 79% overall.

Rat-harborage tickets by hour of the day, 2026All 8,974 citations, by the hour they were written. The afternoon hours, in orange, are when weekend overflow piles up, and inspectors are rarely out then on any day of the week.

The day and hour counts are here as CSV: citations-by-day.csv, citations-by-hour.csv.

311 complaints, and when they were closed

Chicago publishes every 311 service request on its open data portal (dataset v6vf-nfxy). We counted complaints made from January 1, 2024 through August 31, 2026, by the day they came in and the day they were closed.

	Sanitation Code Violation	Rodent Baiting / Rat Complaint
Complaints	39,813	119,914
Closed on a Saturday or Sunday	2.9%	0.35%
Made Sunday, closed Sunday	70 of 3,486 (2.0%)	1 of 8,836
Made Sunday, closed Tuesday or later	61%	72%
Most common hour to close	6 a.m.	10 a.m.

Reports and the law

City of Chicago Office of Inspector General, Audit of DSS's Rat Abatement Program (July 2026).
City of Chicago Office of Inspector General, Audit of DOF's Management of Outstanding Debt (April 2026).
Municipal Code of Chicago, Section 7-28-260.