Chicago restaurant survival rates
How long restaurants actually last in Chicago, cut by cuisine and cohort.
Built forOperators & first-timers · Landlords & property managers
- 2-year and 4-year survival by cuisine
- Cohort sizes behind every rate, shown not hidden
- The base rates every read is scored against
How long each cuisine actually lasts
Each horizon is calculated only from storefronts that survived the previous one, so multiply the bars for a cumulative rate. Lifespans are censoring-aware: a storefront still trading counts as “at least this old” rather than as one that closed at its current age.
Watch one neighbourhood.
This page is the whole city. Pick the area you actually care about and we will email you when a new restaurant licence appears there, and stay quiet when none does. It covers openings only: a closure takes about three years to surface fully in the public record, and we will not send an alert we cannot stand behind.
Every cuisine, every horizon
Sortable. Hover a survival cell for the number of storefronts it was computed from — a rate over eleven attempts is not the same claim as a rate over eleven hundred.
Non-restaurant categories are excluded throughout — Chicago's Retail Food Establishment licence also covers groceries, pharmacies and school cafeterias, and none of them are in this table.