How pass rates have changed over the last 5 years

If you look at Chicago's overall restaurant inspection pass rate year over year, the trend isn't flat. It's moved noticeably over the last five years — sometimes for predictable reasons, sometimes not. Here's what the data shows and a few theories about what's behind it.

The general trend

Across all Chicago food establishments, the percentage of inspections resulting in either Pass or Pass-with-Conditions has bounced in a meaningful range over the last five years. The gap between the highest and lowest year has been around 5–7 percentage points, depending on how you slice it.

That's not a small range. It corresponds to several thousand inspections per year that ended differently than they would have in a different year.

What changed during the early pandemic years

The biggest shift in the data was during 2020–2021, for obvious reasons:

• Many restaurants were closed or operating limited hours
• Inspector visits were paused or reduced for portions of the period
• Restaurants that did stay open had different operational patterns (delivery only, reduced staffing)
• Inspection volume dropped substantially

The data from this period is harder to interpret. Some restaurants got effectively "graced" — their inspection windows passed without inspections, so their last public inspection got older. Other restaurants saw their first inspection in over a year happen during a period of operational chaos.

You see this in the data as a noticeable dip in inspection volume and an unusual mix of results. It's not really comparable to surrounding years.

The recovery period

2022–2023 saw inspectors catching up on missed canvases, plus a wave of re-openings, ownership changes, and operational restarts. A lot of the inspection data from this period reflects:

• Restaurants that were previously stable but lost staff during the pandemic having to rebuild
• New restaurants opening to fill empty real estate
• Inspectors trying to catch up on a backlog while maintaining their normal cycles

Pass rates dropped slightly during this period — not catastrophically, but notably. The most common explanation: kitchens were operating with newer, less experienced staff while still trying to get systems back up to speed.

The recent stabilization

2024–2025 saw the data stabilize into something closer to pre-pandemic norms. A few specific shifts:

• Pest violations, which spiked in the early recovery, came back down
• Temperature violations stayed slightly elevated — possibly a leading indicator of equipment that wasn't replaced during the rough years and is now aging out
• Conditional pass rates climbed slightly, suggesting inspectors are catching more issues but operations are usually correcting them quickly

The overall pass rate ended up only modestly different from where it was five years ago, but the composition shifted.

The neighborhood-level story

City-wide numbers can hide neighborhood-level differences. Some patterns we've noticed:

• **Higher-priced neighborhoods** stayed roughly constant in their pass rates. Their resourced operations weathered the disruption.
• **Mid-priced neighborhoods** showed the most volatility. Plenty of independent restaurants here, often without the financial cushion to handle equipment replacement, training rebuilds, or staffing shifts.
• **Lower-priced neighborhoods** saw the most permanent shifts — some restaurants closed, others operated through the disruption with thinner margins, and the inspection patterns reflect that.

What this means going forward

A few things worth watching:

• **Equipment replacement cycles.** If kitchens deferred capital investments during 2020–2022, those bills are coming due now. We might see equipment-related violations climb over the next year or two.
• **Staffing stability.** Restaurants that built consistent teams over the last 18–24 months should produce better inspection records than ones with high churn.
• **Training infrastructure.** The places that invested in food safety training during the recovery period are likely to be the ones with the cleanest records going forward.

How to read individual records given this trend

When you look at a restaurant's inspection history that spans multiple years:

• A Fail in 2020 or 2021 should be weighted slightly less than one in 2025. The conditions were different.
• A clean record from 2022 onward is meaningful — that's the period of operational normalization.
• Multiple Fails across pre- and post-2022 suggests chronic issues that survived major disruption — that's a stronger signal than a Fail in just one period.

The data has more nuance than a single number can capture. Pass rates are useful as an overall trend marker but not as a verdict on any individual restaurant.

The honest summary

Pass rates shift in response to real-world conditions — staffing, weather, public health events, economic cycles, equipment age. Chicago's data over the last five years shows all of these factors at work.

What hasn't changed: the basic patterns of which kitchens pass cleanly and which ones don't. The well-run operations stay well-run. The struggling ones keep struggling. The conditions around them shift, but the underlying differences don't.