In Lincoln Park, nearly half the houses — 48.5 per 100 — appealed their 2025 assessment at the Board of Review. In Hegewisch and on the East Side, about 4 per 100 did.
77,942 Chicago house appeals · 446,354 house parcels · tax year 2025An assessment is the Cook County Assessor’s valuation of a property for tax purposes, and it is the number property tax bills are computed from — exemptions and a state equalization multiplier apply before the rate does. With the levies held fixed, a lower assessed value generally means a lower bill. Any owner can challenge the number for free, and the Board of Review — a separate, three-member elected body, not the County Board — hears those challenges. Our earlier reporting found Chicago homeowners who filed there without a lawyer won a reduction 59.5 percent of the time in 2025. This page maps who actually files. The answer is lopsided. Citywide, 17 of every 100 houses filed. Along the North Side lakefront the rate runs two and a half times that; across the Southwest and Southeast Sides it falls to a fraction of it.
Filing runs about 12 times higher in the heaviest areas than in the lightest
- Lincoln Park48.5
- Lake View48.3
- North Center41.8
- West Town39.9
- Near North Side37.6
- Ashburn4.8
- West Englewood4.5
- South Deering4.5
- Hegewisch4.3
- East Side4.1
The five heaviest-filing areas — Lincoln Park, Lake View, North Center, West Town, Near North Side — hold 7 percent of the city’s houses and produced 18 percent of its house appeals. The lightest-filing areas sit on the Southwest and Southeast Sides — Ashburn and West Englewood on one, South Deering, Hegewisch and the East Side on the other. The spread between the ends of the ranking is about 12 to one, and it does not track the odds of winning.
Where fewer people file, the filers win more often
West Englewood filed at one of the lowest rates in the city (4.5 per 100 houses) and won 56 percent of the appeals it did file — the highest win rate of any community area we could measure. Lincoln Park, the heaviest filer, won 34 percent. Near South Side won 13 percent, the lowest. The median community-area win rate is 46 percent — a median across areas, not the citywide rate. This is an observation about the appeals that were actually filed: the few owners who file in low-filing areas may simply have the strongest cases, and nothing here says a marginal filer would fare as well. The numbers cannot say how an appeal that was never filed would have fared. What they do show is narrower and still striking: the appeals actually filed from the lowest-filing areas succeeded more often than house appeals citywide, 45 percent of which won a reduction in 2025.
What a won appeal means for everyone else in the district
Under Illinois law each taxing district adopts a levy, and the County Clerk calculates the rate from that levy and the district’s equalized assessed value — so for a fixed levy, value removed from one property is carried by all the others. (Appeals reduce assessed value before the state multiplier is applied; the multiplier is county-wide, so it does not change this arithmetic.) Our relief-by-class reporting measured that machinery at city scale. Chicago’s houses share the largest levies — city, schools, county — and within a shared district, a parcel that wins a reduction lowers its share of the base the rate is struck on. After exemptions and the year’s other assessment changes settle, the difference is carried across the parcels whose values did not fall. Any single appeal moves that needle by a sliver, the smaller overlapping districts complicate the edges, and this page does not compute any neighborhood’s dollar shift. It maps the direction of the pattern, not its size. No individual owner does anything improper by appealing; the tilt is a property of the system.
How we counted
- Numerator: the Board of Review’s Appeal Decision History (7pny-nedm), tax year 2025, Chicago’s eight townships, majorclass Residential excluding condominiums and their garages (classes 299/399) — the same houses-only scope as our appeals piece: condo appeals are a different market, winning roughly one appeal in ten in 2025 against 39 to 60 percent for houses. One appeal counted per parcel: the file’s 77,942 house rows are 77,942 distinct parcels.
- Denominator: the Assessor’s Parcel Universe, the same townships and house classes, one row per parcel with coordinates. That file is a current-year (2026) snapshot, used here for its coordinates; its 446,354 distinct house parcels sit 61 parcels (about 0.014 percent) from the 446,415 on the Assessor’s tax-year-2025 assessed-values roll, so it stands in for the 2025 housing stock.
- The join: every appeal and every parcel is placed in its community area by its coordinates. 7 appeals and 55 parcels could not be placed; they are excluded from every rate on this page and disclosed here.
- Thin areas: the Loop (26 house parcels), Oakland (461) and Riverdale (496) have too few houses for a fair rate and are greyed on the map. Win rates are shown only for areas with at least 100 appeals.
- Win rates describe the past: they cover the appeals actually filed in 2025. Whether any future appeal succeeds depends on the case.
- What this is not: advice to appeal or not to appeal. Filing windows open by township on the Board of Review’s site, and filing there is free.
Computed by KCM Desk from Board of Review and Assessor records, tax year 2025; published July 27, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.