What is a Chicago taxi medallion worth? The city has been writing the answer down, sale by sale, since 2007 — a file of the recorded transfers of the metal plate a cab needs to operate — and the ledger now holds 5,729 transfers through August 13, 2026. The median recorded sale hit $357,000 in 2013. In 2026 it is $6,000 — a 98.3 percent collapse, written into the city’s own file one closing at a time. The record holds more than the fall: recorded transfers nearly stopped before prices gave way (560 in 2012, 21 in 2015); 886 sales closed at $300,000 or more, and 485 have closed at $10,000 or less; one medallion, number 5870, sold near the top for $380,000, and its last recorded transfer, in 2022, closed at $12,000; and the most frequent seller in the whole file is the City of Chicago’s own business-affairs department, with 99 transfers. Why it happened is not in the file — prices are recorded, causes are not — and this page keeps the two apart.
Taxi Medallion Transfers (6u8z-aubf), all 5,729 recorded transfers, June 7, 2007 – August 13, 2026 · retrieved August 24, 2026 · price figures are of the 5,563 positive-price sales; 166 $0 transfers are counted separatelyThe arc, year by year
Every figure below is from the city’s transfer file: the number of recorded transfers each year, and the median and highest price among that year’s positive-price sales. The $0 transfers — 166 across the file, recorded closings with a $0 sale price — are in the transfer counts but excluded from every price figure on this page.
| Year | Recorded transfers | Median sale (positive-price) | Highest sale |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | 200 | $85,000 | $126,750 |
| 2009 | 551 | $170,000 | $202,000 |
| 2011 | 424 | $235,000 | $326,000 |
| 2012 | 560 | $345,000 | $390,000 |
| 2013 | 380 | $357,000 | $370,000 |
| 2015 | 21 | $244,000 | $290,000 |
| 2017 | 139 | $55,000 | $110,000 |
| 2019 | 491 | $25,000 | $65,000 |
| 2021 | 289 | $11,500 | $80,000 |
| 2023 | 315 | $12,000 | $20,000 |
| 2026 | 93 | $6,000 | $19,000 |
The highest price the file has ever recorded is $390,000, paid three separate times in 2012. The highest median came a year later: $357,000 across 374 positive-price sales in 2013. The 2026 median is $6,000, and no sale this year has topped $19,000.
Transfers nearly stopped before prices gave way
Read the transfer counts, not just the prices. In 2012 the file records 560 transfers — the busiest year it holds — at a median of $345,000. Two years later there were 115, a fifth of them recorded at $0. In 2015 there were 21 transfers all year — and their median, $244,000, was still within reach of the peak. Only afterward does the price level give way: by 2019 the median is $25,000 on 491 transfers — volume back near the old levels, at a fraction of the old price — and 2021 is the first year in which most recorded sales closed under $20,000. The sequence in the file is freeze first, collapse second: recorded transfers all but stopped before prices gave way. Why is a question the file does not answer — it records prices, not causes, and no column in it names a competitor. Whatever explanation a reader brings, the freeze-then-fall sequence itself is the part the record can verify.
One medallion’s round trip
The file tracks medallions by number, so a single plate’s history can be read straight off it. Medallion 5870 appears three times: it sold near the top of the market for $380,000, and its last recorded transfer, on October 20, 2022, closed at $12,000 — a $368,000 fall on one asset, recorded in the same public file that recorded its peak. It is not unusual: 4,221 distinct medallions appear across the 5,729 transfers, and 1,289 of them — 31 percent — have changed hands more than once, spanning eras whose median prices differ nearly sixty-fold.
The city is the file’s most frequent seller
Group the seller names (they are business entities as filed; this page case-folds spelling variants) and the top of the list is not a cab company: it is “City of Chicago BACP” — the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, the regulator itself — recorded as the seller on 99 transfers. How those medallions came to be in the city’s hands is not stated in the file, and this page leaves that question with it. Setting the city’s name aside, the most frequent seller name in the file appears on 42 transfers and the most frequent buyer name on 18.
Questions this file can answer
What does a Chicago taxi medallion sell for now? The 2026 median recorded sale is $6,000, across 85 positive-price transfers through August 13; the year’s highest is $19,000. The three most recent transfers in the file, all closed in August 2026, are $5,000 each.
What was the peak? $390,000, recorded three times in 2012. The peak median year was 2013 at $357,000. In total, 886 recorded sales closed at $300,000 or more — each of them fifty times the 2026 median or higher.
Does the file say why prices collapsed? No. It records closings, prices and company names, nothing else. The freeze-then-fall sequence and its timing are in the record; the explanation is not, and this page does not supply one.
How we counted
- Source: the city’s Taxi Medallion Transfers file (6u8z-aubf): every recorded transfer — closing date, medallion number, sale price, and the buyer’s and seller’s company names — 5,729 rows from June 7, 2007 through August 13, 2026, retrieved August 24, 2026. The full file was downloaded and every figure on this page recomputed from it.
- Prices: medians, means, minima and maxima are computed on the 5,563 transfers with a positive sale price. The 166 transfers recorded at $0 are counted and reported by year but never enter a price statistic; the file does not say what a $0 closing represents, and this page does not guess in its numbers.
- Names: seller and buyer names in the file are business entities. They are case-folded (case, punctuation and spacing normalized) before grouping; no individual’s name appears in this analysis.
- Limits: the file records medallions that transferred. Medallions that never traded have no price here, so nothing on this page is a valuation of the whole fleet; a transfer’s recorded price is what was reported at closing, and the file does not say whether anyone audits it.
Computed by KCM Desk from the city’s medallion transfer records, retrieved August 24, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.