Methodology & Sources

About 311info

311info publishes 311 service request counts from 25cities in the US and Canada. Each city page reports total requests, monthly volume, and per-category breakdowns derived from that city’s open data portal. 311info is an independent project and is not affiliated with any government agency.

About 311

311 is the non-emergency service request system used by most North American cities for issues such as potholes, noise complaints, illegal parking, sanitation, and graffiti. Residents file requests by phone, mobile app, or web form. Each request is published as a row in the city’s open dataset with a category, a location, and a creation timestamp.

Data sources

Data is pulled directly from each city’s open data portal. Fields are normalized across portal types (Socrata, ArcGIS, CKAN, Carto, OpenDataSoft) and loaded into a warehouse for serving. No third-party aggregators are used. Each city page links to the underlying dataset on the city’s portal.

Update frequency

Ingestion runs on the 2nd of each month for the previous calendar month. Each city page shows its exact data coverage window; the “Data through” stamp in each page header reflects the most recent record in the current build.

Computation

Every count on this site is a row count over a filter:

• Total requests is the count of every 311 row the city has published within the coverage window.
• Monthly volume groups those rows by the month the request was created in the city’s local time.
• Per-category counts use a hand-curated mapping from each city’s raw service-type string to a normalized cross-city category (e.g. noise, potholes_roads, sanitation, graffiti). Rows whose raw type does not match any known category fall into other.
• Resolution time and closure rate are only displayed when the underlying sample meets a quality threshold: at least 5,000 requests with a real closed-date timestamp AND at least 50% of the city’s rows containing resolution data. Cities that do not publish reliable close-dates have these metrics hidden.

Service category mapping → Full table of how raw service types map to normalized categories. CSV download available.

Citation format

Suggested citation format for articles and research:

311info, "Chicago 311 service requests," data through April 2026,
derived from the City of Chicago open 311 service request data.
https://311info.com/city/chicago/

Each city page links to the underlying dataset on the city’s portal, which may be cited as the primary source.

Cities tracked

25 cities, alphabetical: