As Chicago’s government prepares for the 2027 municipal budgeting cycle, most of the city’s departments have continued to operate well within their budgets — with the same exceptions and outliers as the previous year. 

The Chicago Police Department exceeded its allotted spend in local, non-grant funds once again in 2025, spending $145.8 million more than the department’s budgeted $1.9 billion. CPD is the only department to have exceeded its budget every year in the four years beginning in 2022 for which the Department of Finance has retained detailed, appropriation-level records of actual spend. 

The Chicago Fire Department and Chicago Commission on Human Relations, both of which exceeded budget in 2024, overshot their 2025 budgets as well, albeit by significantly smaller amounts than the police, and in the case of the fire department, only due to a shortfall in revenue replacement funds.

Beginning with the 2022 budget cycle, the city’s Department of Finance has retained records of non-grant actual spend down to the appropriation category, which allows detailed analysis of over- and under-budget spending. (Prior to 2022, broad summaries are available in PDF form in the city’s Annual Comprehensive Fiscal Reports.) Grant spending is not included in the local fund actuals nor in this analysis. 

During the past four years for which detailed records are available, the city has on average spent 86.4% of each years’ local fund budgets. Operating departments, on average, spent 84.8% of their local fund budgets, but that average covers an extremely wide range, from an average of 6.7% annual overspend (CPD) to -76.2% underspend by the city’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD). 

As in previous years, most departments stayed within their allotted budgets in 2025. CPD’s $145.8 million overspend was the largest departmental net variance, positive or negative. The Chicago Department of Aviation had the largest departmental net under-spend, coming in $134.3 million under-budget. 

As a percentage of departmental budget, the Chicago Fire Department overspent the most, exceeding the department’s allotted budget by 9.8%. The Department of Planning and Development, as in previous years, was an outlier with 87% of its local fund budget unspent; most other departments left between 1-20% of their non-grant budgets unspent. 

The police department continues to be a dramatic outlier in spending against budget. Where most departments operate within their budgeted means, CPD’s spending in excess of budget is in and of itself larger than most departments’ total budgets – of the city’s 39 operating departments in 2025, only eight (of which CPD is one) had budgets equal to or greater than CPD’s $145.8 million of overspend. 

Police department overspend in 2025 was slightly lower than the previous year, both net and as a percent of departmental budget. Despite the reduction in overspend, total CPD local fund expenditures still rose, due to a larger starting budget. 

At the appropriation level, the largest driver of overspend within CPD’s budget is the broad personnel services category, with substantial overspend in payments due to legal judgments and settlements as well, and relatively smaller (but still multi-million dollar) overspend on claims outside of workman’s compensation. 

Personnel service expenditures include base salaries and various contractual enhancements such as overtime, duty availability and compensatory time, as well as uniform allowances, tuition reimbursement and other benefits. While the Office of Budget and Management breaks out the subcategories of personnel services into individual appropriation accounts for budget documents, the Department of Finance local fund actuals dataset lumps them together and uses the spelling “personal services” rather than “personnel.” (However, the account numbers and total budgets match between the two departments.) 

That lack of itemization means that it is not possible to track overspend as an individual appropriation using the DoF data. However, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) maintains a separate database of police overtime payments, which allows for an approximate comparison. OIG-tracked overtime payments vastly exceed the overtime budgeted in the annual appropriations ordinance, suggesting that overtime accounts for the majority of CPD’s personnel services overspend. 

Based on OIG data and the overtime appropriation account from the annual appropriations ordinances, CPD from 2022-2025 averaged roughly 173.6% overspend on overtime payments, or an average annual excess of roughly $184.6 million dollars. 

On average, overtime was budgeted as 6.4% of total CPD personnel services from 2022-2025, but made up approximately 16.8% of actual personnel services spend. 

A measure limiting CPD to its roughly $205 million in budgeted overtime – and requiring a separate ordinance passed by the city council to expend any further funds – was proposed as part of the 2026 budget, but removed prior to the final version’s passage. Following passage of the budget, Mayor Johnson instead issued an executive order requiring that any overtime in excess of the budgeted amount be in response to a “bona fide emergency” and mandating that the police department submit any such request three months in advance. 

As of Aug. 31, OIG data shows $164.9 million paid in CPD overtime so far in 2026, roughly 80% of the $204.6 million budgeted for police overtime in the annual appropriations ordinance. At that time the department had not yet submitted a request for additional overtime as described in the executive order, according to the Office of Budget and Management.

In addition to personnel overspend, the department’s overspend on legal judgments and settlements continues a long-running trend. As a BGA Policy analysis noted in 2022 (and continues to be the case), the city’s annual budget for police settlements and judgments has not changed since then-mayor Lori Lightfoot increased the budgeted amount to roughly $82.6 million for FY2020. That year, which saw significant court delays due to COVID-19 shutdowns, was the only one in recent history in which CPD underspent its settlements and judgments budget. Unlike the overtime budget, which the 2026 appropriations ordinance increased to at least somewhat better reflect real spending trends, the appropriation for legal judgments and settlements continues to be dramatically underbudgeted every year. 

While CPD remains by far the largest net overspender among the city’s departments, the Chicago Fire Department saw the largest increase in overspend as a percent of total budget from 2024 to 2025. (In 2022 and 2023 the department came in under budget.) 

However, this year’s CFD overspend largely comes from $74 million in revenue replacement initially budgeted for CFD from American Rescue Plan COVID relief funds that did not appear in the 2025 actuals. That gap left CFD over budget in its corporate fund spend despite coming under budget in most of its actual expense categories. 

CFD did still overspend in its court settlement and non-workman’s compensation claims appropriations, but those excesses alone would not have pushed the overall department budget into the red. (Similarly, in 2023, CFD saw some overspend in non-workman’s compensation claims, but stayed under budget overall.) 

A dramatically smaller department than the other two overspenders, the Chicago Commission on Human Relations (CCHR) is a 20-member office tasked with enforcing the city’s Human Rights and Fair Housing ordinances. In 2024 and 2025, the department exceeded its personnel services budget by 2.6% and 3.1% respectively.

In response to BGA Policy’s inquiries regarding the overspend, CCHR cited cost of living increases for non-represented employees (those not covered by a union bargaining agreement with the city) and the addition of certain titles to annual salary schedules that had not previously received scheduled periodic pay increases. 

The Department of Planning and Development has been a consistent outlier in local fund spending since appropriations-level data became available, expending only an average of 23.8% of the department’s local fund budget from 2022-2025. 

DPD’s underspend is primarily driven by the Rehabilitation Loans and Grants category. In 2022 Rehabilitation Loans and Grants was a $7 million appropriation funded entirely by CDBG grant funds (meaning actuals are not available from the Department of Finance actuals and encumbrances dataset, which only contains local funds). In 2023 and 2024, the appropriation moved to a combination of local and grant funds, the local portions of which were substantially underspent. 

The locally-funded portion of the Rehabilitation Loans and Grants appropriation draws from the Neighborhoods Opportunity, Local Impact, and Citywide Adopt-a-Landmark Funds. All of the 2025 appropriations from the latter two funds are earmarked for rehabilitation loans and grants, as are 98% of the appropriations budgeted in the Neighborhood Opportunities fund.

In addition to the locally-funded $89 million that went 99% unspent in 2025, DPD had a further $45.5 million budgeted for rehabilitation loans and grants from grant and CDBG funding, for which actuals are not available.

The Department of Planning and Development did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Update: Following publication of this analysis, the Department of Planning and Development responded: 

“DPD spending is driven by the department’s grant programs, which allocate funding for hundreds of large and small neighborhood improvement projects every year.

Assistance terms typically require several months to finalize after a project application is approved, followed by 18 to 30 months of construction monitoring that confirms eligible project costs. Incremental grant payments are provided as projects advance toward completion, with some larger projects receiving a portion of total grant amounts for several years to come, depending on terms. Thus, DPD spending extends far beyond a given year’s fiscal appropriation, a scenario that reoccurs every year.” 

The department expects actual spend in the rehabilitation grants and loans appropriation from the Neighborhoods Opportunity, Local Impact, and Citywide Adopt-a-Landmark Funds to increase as projects finalize.