Where your property taxes go: TIF districts
Tax Increment Financing freezes a district’s property-tax base and diverts the growth — the “increment” — to that district for about 23 years. It is roughly a billion dollars a year citywide and the most-debated line item in Chicago finance. How much of your community area sits inside a TIF, and how much increment does that divert? Search your address or click any community area, and switch between coverage and increment.
How to read this map
TIF coverage is the share of a community area’s parcels that fall inside an active TIF district — assigned by testing each parcel’s location against the City’s district boundaries. TIF districts don’t overlap, so a parcel is inside at most one. The drawer names the districts covering each area with their approval and expiration years.
Increment per parcel takes each district’s most recent annual increment (2024 TIF Balances) and apportions it to the community areas it covers by their share of the district’s parcels, then divides by the area’s parcels. This is an estimate: the City reports increment per district, not per parcel, so read it as the scale of diverted revenue in an area, not an exact figure. The drawer shows each district’s citywide increment and fund balance. The ramp is neutral — TIF is a contested tool, and this map reports magnitude, not a verdict.
We cross-checked the parcel-to-district assignment against the Cook County Assessor’s own TIF field on a sample of ~2,600 parcels and found about 91% agreement; the ~9% difference is mostly parcels near a district edge (we test the parcel’s center point) and parcels the Assessor’s field leaves blank.
Source: City of Chicago TIF district boundaries (100 active; 86 repealed districts are stored but excluded from this active view) and the TIF Balances report (2024), joined by TIF number. See methodology for the apportionment method and the Assessor cross-check.