HEALTH INSPECTION VIOLATIONS.
Chicago inspectors work from a 63-item checklist. Each item that fails becomes a numbered violation on the report. Below is every code cited at least 50 times, how often it appears, and how strongly it predicts an actual failure — measured across 56,625 inspections.
Frequency is not severity
The two columns below tell different stories, and confusing them is the most common mistake people make reading an inspection report. The most-cited violation in Chicago — #55, physical facilities installed, maintained & clean — appears on 56% of graded inspections and raises failure risk to just 29.5% against a 27.5% baseline. It is almost noise.
The items that actually predict failure are rarer and mostly concern what happened after a previous inspection. Violation 59 — previous priority foundation violation corrected — precedes a failure 93% of the time. Being told and not acting is a far stronger signal than anything a single visit finds.
The 10 most common violations
- Physical Facilities Installed, Maintained & Clean
- Food & Non-food Contact Surfaces Cleanable, Properly Designed, Constructed & Used
- Non-food/food Contact Surfaces Clean
- Plumbing Installed; Proper Backflow Devices
- Adequate Handwashing Sinks Properly Supplied and Accessible
- Insects, Rodents, & Animals not Present
- Adequate Ventilation & Lighting; Designated Areas Used
- Allergen Training As Required
- Toilet Facilities: Properly Constructed, Supplied, & Cleaned
- All Food Employees Have Food Handler Training
Search all 50 codes
Showing 50 of 50 codes
Violation codes FAQ
What are the most common Chicago health inspection violations?
The most-cited is violation 55, Physical Facilities Installed, Maintained & Clean, appearing in 56% of graded inspections. It is followed by violation 47 (Food & Non-food Contact Surfaces Cleanable, Properly Designed, Constructed & Used) and violation 49 (Non-food/food Contact Surfaces Clean). All three relate to facility condition and cleanliness rather than food handling, and none raises failure risk much above the 27.5% baseline.
Which violations actually predict a failed inspection?
The strongest predictors are not conditions but uncorrected history. Violation 59, Previous Priority Foundation Violation Corrected, precedes a failure 93% of the time — 3.39× the 27.5% baseline. Pest activity (violation 38) is the strongest condition-based signal at 2.24×. Frequency and severity are close to unrelated: the most-cited violation carries almost no extra risk.
What is the difference between a priority, priority foundation, and core violation?
Chicago sorts violations into three tiers. Priority violations (roughly codes 1–29) address the most direct routes to foodborne illness: temperature control, contamination, sick employees. Priority foundation violations (roughly 30–44) cover the procedures, equipment and training that make those controls possible. Core violations (roughly 45–63) concern facility maintenance, cleanliness and paperwork. A single priority violation can fail an inspection; core violations usually cannot on their own.
How many violation codes does Chicago use?
The city's current inspection form runs to 63 numbered items, though not all appear often. This page lists the 50 codes cited at least 50 times across 56,625 graded inspections since 2022; rarer codes are omitted because a failure rate computed on a handful of inspections is not meaningful.
Where does this data come from?
The City of Chicago's Food Inspections dataset (4ijn-s7e5), published as open data by the Chicago Department of Public Health. The citation counts and failure rates are derived from those records, not published by the city.
Sources
- City of Chicago — Food Inspections dataset (4ijn-s7e5)Every record referenced on this page.
- Chicago Department of Public Health — Restaurant InspectionHow inspections are conducted and how violations are classified.
How these figures were calculated
The city publishes the records but not these rates. They were derived from 56,625 inspections since 2022 with a graded result of Pass, Pass w/ Conditions or Fail, with each violation string parsed for its leading code number. For any code, the rate shown is the share of inspections citing it that ended in a failure, against a 27.5% baseline across the whole sample. Codes cited fewer than 50 times are excluded.
A single inspection commonly cites several violations, so the codes are not mutually exclusive and their shares do not sum to 100%. Anyone can reproduce this from the dataset linked above.
Independent service — not affiliated with the City of Chicago, Cook County, or any restaurant. Health inspection data sourced directly from the City of Chicago's public Food Inspections open-data feed (data.cityofchicago.org, dataset 4ijn-s7e5), rebuilt from the live feed on every deploy. Neighborhood is derived from ZIP code and is approximate.