The L is carrying about 62% of its pre-pandemic weekday riders — but that single number is hiding the actual story. We pulled entry counts for all 144 stations from the city’s data portal and compared this year to 2019, station by station. Among the 132 stations where the comparison is clean — open both years, no construction distortion — exactly two are busier than they were before the pandemic, and neither is downtown: Cermak-Chinatown (110% of 2019) and Morgan, in Fulton Market (106%). Meanwhile the subway stations under the Loop’s office core are running at 41–51%. Chicago’s transit recovery isn’t a number. It’s a map — and on it, the stations serving destination neighborhoods have refilled far faster than the stations that feed office towers.
What we computed
The CTA publishes daily entry totals for every L station, current through May 31, 2026. We averaged weekday entries for January–May 2026 and the same five months of 2019 — identical seasons, weekdays only — for every station that existed in both years. Systemwide across those stations: 567,475 average weekday entries then, 349,505 now — 61.6%.
One honesty rule before the rankings: construction moves riders around, and pretending otherwise would make this analysis lie. We excluded twelve stations whose 2026 numbers reflect closures rather than demand — State/Lake, closed since January 5 for a three-year rebuild; the Forest Park branch stations affected by the $268 million Forest Park Branch Rebuild; and Washington/Wabash, whose near-perfect 98% is partly State/Lake’s displaced riders walking one block. The full exclusion list is at the bottom.
The two stations that beat 2019
Cermak-Chinatown averaged 3,660 weekday entries in early 2019 and 4,024 this year. Morgan — the Green/Pink Line stop in Fulton Market — went from 3,424 to 3,634. What they have in common: neither is an office-tower station. They serve dense, destination neighborhoods where people live, eat, and increasingly work — and in Fulton Market’s case, a neighborhood that our permit analysis found at the center of the city’s construction surge, with the Near West Side leading all 77 community areas.
Chart: KCM Desk analysis of CTA station-entry data (City of Chicago Data Portal), weekday averages, Jan–May 2026 vs. Jan–May 2019. Hover any bar for exact figures.
The bottom of the map is the office story
Strip out construction effects and the least-recovered stations cluster with uncomfortable precision: Monroe/State at 41%, Monroe/Dearborn at 46%, Lake/State at 48%, Jackson/State at 51%. These are the Red and Blue Line subway stops that exist to deliver office workers to desks — stations that once absorbed 8,000–20,000 entries every weekday and now run at roughly half. The airports split the difference (O’Hare 79%, Midway 61%), and the big neighborhood stations — Belmont, Logan Square, 95th/Dan Ryan — sit in the low 60s, right around the system average.
We’ll say plainly what this data can and can’t support: it counts people entering stations, not why. The downtown pattern is consistent with hybrid work hollowing out the five-day commute, but station entries can’t prove motive — and only three stations outside the construction zones are even at 90% of 2019. The recovery has a long tail everywhere; it’s just longest where the cubicles are.
What it means if you’re choosing where to live
Station entries are one imperfect but honest signal of how much coming-and-going a corner of the city generates — they can’t see storefronts or nightlife directly. By that one signal, Chinatown and Fulton Market are the only places on the L map generating more of it than in 2019. If your life runs on a five-day Loop commute, the emptier downtown stations mostly mean shorter platform waits — but they’re also why downtown-adjacent policy fights and office-to-residential conversions will keep dominating city politics: station entries near half of 2019 mean far less daily foot traffic feeding Loop street life than the pre-pandemic normal.
One more thing the map quietly records: Damen-Lake, the Green Line station that opened in August 2024, already averages about 960 weekday entries with no 2019 baseline to compare — a brand-new station one stop west of Morgan, in the same corridor as one of the two recovery leaders.
Sources & data
- City of Chicago Data Portal — CTA Ridership: L Station Entries, Daily Totals (dataset 5neh-572f, through May 31, 2026; pulled July 17, 2026). Method: average of daytype-W (weekday) entries per station, Jan 1–May 31, each year; stations with 2019 weekday averages under 100 excluded from ratios.
- Block Club Chicago — State/Lake closure (January 2026–2029)
- CTA via Mass Transit — Forest Park Branch Rebuild, $268M, phased station closures
- Excluded as construction-affected: State/Lake; Forest Park, Harlem, Oak Park, Pulaski, Cicero, Austin, Western and Kedzie-Homan (Forest Park branch); Racine; UIC-Halsted; Washington/Wabash (inflated by State/Lake’s closure)
Computed and verified by KCM Desk against the sources above as of July 17, 2026. The dataset updates monthly; we’ll revisit when full-year data lands. Want the numbers for a station we didn’t chart? Ask — we have all 144.