Chicago publishes its own empty-seats ledger, monthly. The Workforce Vacancies file — “extracted from the City of Chicago’s Chicago Integrated Personnel and Payroll System (CHIPPS)” — lists, as of its August 31, 2026 snapshot, 1,310 position lines that each carry at least one unfilled seat: 3,857 vacancies standing beside 22,464 filled positions on those same lines. The single biggest hole is a single title: POLICE OFFICER, 732 vacancies. This page computes no citywide vacancy rate, because the file cannot support one: position lines with no vacancy do not appear in it at all, so its totals describe the lines with empty seats — and only those.
Workforce Vacancies (9v3e-pcjs), 1,310 rows, one per department/fund/division/section/title line, report date August 31, 2026, retrieved September 8, 2026; the whole file was downloaded and every figure recomputed · every row carries at least one vacancy, and each row’s total equals its filled plus vacant counts — verified on all 1,310 · a “represents a point-in-time extract from the CHIPPS vacancy and occupancy data and may not reflect real-time or up-to-date data,” per the file’s own disclaimer, “updated on a monthly basis and published on the first business day of each month”How to read a vacancy roster honestly
Three of the file’s own sentences do most of the work. It is a point-in-time extract from CHIPPS, the city’s personnel and payroll system. It excludes a whole category by design: “This dataset does not include open line positions. Open line positions represent a position that is budgeted based on the number of hours or months of work needed.” And it lists only lines carrying vacancies, which is why this page computes no rate against the whole workforce — the denominator isn’t here. The budget book’s side of this story is a different instrument: our budgeted-versus-payroll piece reads the 2026 appropriation ordinance, and the roster piece reads the employee file; this file is the personnel system’s own monthly count of empty chairs, and the three are never blended.
Where the empty seats cluster
| Department, as filed | Positions on listed lines | Vacancies | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|
| D57 – Chicago Police Department | 13,100 | 1,393 | 167 |
| D59 – Chicago Fire Department | 2,979 | 390 | 78 |
| D88 – Department of Water Management | 1,312 | 290 | 127 |
| D85 – Department of Aviation | 1,620 | 278 | 116 |
| D81 – Department of Streets and Sanitation | 1,830 | 182 | 51 |
| D58 – Office of Emergency Management and Communications | 802 | 165 | 29 |
| D41 – Department of Public Health | 387 | 164 | 108 |
| D84 – Chicago Department of Transportation | 803 | 155 | 89 |
The Police Department’s vacancy-carrying lines hold 13,100 positions and 1,393 of the file’s 3,857 vacancies — 36 percent of the empty seats in a single department. The Department of Public Health’s listed lines run smaller and emptier: 387 positions, 164 vacant — 42 percent of the seats on its listed lines, a share of those lines and nothing broader. Water Management (290), Aviation (278), and Streets and Sanitation (182) fill out the top five. Why any seat is empty — hiring pipelines, budgets, attrition — is not in the file, and not on this page.
The titles behind the numbers
Across 620 job titles, the vacancy list is top-heavy with uniforms: POLICE OFFICER leads at 732 vacancies (its listed lines hold 8,573 positions — the biggest single line reads 7,395 positions, 6,994 filled, 401 vacant), followed by FIREFIGHTER-EMT (RECRUIT) at 169 — one line accounts for 166 of them — POLICE OFFICER (ASSIGNED AS DETECTIVE) at 130, MOTOR TRUCK DRIVER at 119, and SERGEANT at 107. Each title shown is the file’s own label with its CHIPPS code trimmed for readability — the police-officer line, for instance, is filed as T9161. At the other end of the texture: 897 of the 1,310 lines — two in three — carry exactly one vacancy. Most of this file is one empty chair at a time.
Four funds, one ledger
The file splits its lines across four fund types: the Corporate Fund carries 693 lines and 2,355 vacancies, Enterprise Funds 792 vacancies, Special Revenue Funds 509, and Grant Funds 201. Which fund carries a seat is part of each row, as filed; what any vacancy means for that fund’s spending, the file does not say.
- Source: the city’s Workforce Vacancies file (9v3e-pcjs): 1,310 rows, report date August 31, 2026, retrieved September 8, 2026. The whole file was downloaded; every row’s total-equals-filled-plus-vacant arithmetic was verified; quoted lines are the file’s own description and disclaimer.
- The boundary: every row in the file carries at least one vacancy; position lines with none are absent, and open line positions are excluded by the file’s own note. No citywide vacancy rate can be computed from this file, and none appears here. Every percentage names its denominator where it appears — a share of the file’s 3,857 vacancies, or a share of one department’s listed positions.
- Companions: the 2026 budget ordinance and the employee roster are read in separate pieces from separate files; figures from the three instruments are never combined.
- Not here: no cause for any vacancy, no hiring or staffing assessment, no person — the file counts seats, and so does this page.
Computed by KCM Desk from the city’s workforce-vacancy file, retrieved September 8, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.
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