How Fast Does a City Respond to a Rat Complaint?
Chicago takes a median of 3.7 days to close a rat complaint, and 73.7 per cent close within a week. New York appears to close them the same day, but that is an artefact: 38.8 per cent of closed rodent complaints are logged as duplicates of an earlier report, and once those are removed every single remaining complaint still closes on the day it was made. New York’s 311 system records a referral, not a visit.
Both cities publish every service request they receive, with the date it was created and the date it was closed. That looks like a straightforward way to compare how fast a city responds to rats. It is not, and the reason is the most useful thing in this data for anyone trying to hold a city to account.
Chicago: 3.7 days, and a real distribution
Chicago closed 44,181 rat complaints made in 2025. The time from complaint to closure has the shape you would expect from a system that dispatches an inspector and records what happened.
| Measure | Days |
|---|---|
| Fastest quarter closed within | 1.2 |
| Median | 3.7 |
| Mean | 4.7 |
| Slowest quarter starts at | 7.1 |
| Slowest tenth starts at | 10.6 |
Days from creation to closure for rat complaints created in 2025. 73.7 per cent closed within seven days, and effectively none took longer than 30 days.
The spread matters as much as the median. A quarter of complaints are handled in a little over a day, and the slow tail is short: the ninetieth percentile is 10.6 days, not months. Whatever else can be said about rat pressure in Chicago, the complaint system itself is not where cases disappear.
New York: what a closure actually records
New York’s rodent complaints tell a different story, and the first version of it is wrong. Of 31,295 rodent complaints created and closed in 2025, the median time to closure is zero days. Read naively, that makes New York roughly four days faster than Chicago.
Two things undermine that. First, 12,143 of those closures, 38.8 per cent, carry a resolution saying the department had already received an earlier complaint for the same location. Those are administrative merges rather than responses, and they close instantly by definition.
Second, and more telling, removing them changes nothing. Across the remaining 19,152 complaints, 100 per cent still close on the same day, at every percentile we measured. A real inspection workflow does not produce that. Inspectors do not reach every address on the day of the call, and if they did, the distribution would still show some spread.
The explanation is in how the system is built. A rodent complaint to 311 is routed to the health department, and the 311 record closes when the referral is made. The inspection is a separate event, recorded in a separate dataset, sometimes weeks later. New York’s zero-day figure measures the speed of a handoff.
Why this matters beyond trivia
City 311 response times get quoted in local coverage and in council hearings, and this dataset will support almost any claim someone wants to make from it. A story comparing the two cities on closure time would conclude that New York responds eight times faster than Chicago, and it would be entirely wrong.
The general rule this illustrates: when a public dataset shows a median of zero and no spread, the field is recording a status change rather than work being done. The test is cheap. Look at the distribution rather than the average, and read the resolution text.
For New York, the meaningful number sits in the inspection records instead. Those show how many inspections the city actually performs and what share find rats, which we cover in our analysis of what city inspections find. For complaint volumes and seasonality in both cities, see our 311 rat complaint analysis.
What this means if you have reported rats
- A closed complaint is not a resolved problem. In New York in particular, closure may mean only that the report reached the right department.
- Read the resolution text on your own complaint, which is published in the open data alongside the dates. It distinguishes a referral, a duplicate and an inspection outcome.
- Expect roughly a working week in Chicago, where three quarters of complaints close within seven days.
- A duplicate closure is not a dismissal. It generally means the address is already in the queue, though it also means the case count understates how many households are affected.
- City response and private treatment are different things. A municipal inspection addresses the property owner’s obligations; it is not a substitute for treatment, and our guidance on rodent removal costs covers what that involves.
How we did this
We pulled all service requests from the New York 311 dataset with a complaint type of Rodent, and all requests from the Chicago 311 dataset with a request type containing Rat, created between 1 January and 31 December 2025 and since closed. Closure time is the difference between the created and closed timestamps. We excluded records where that difference was negative or over 400 days, which removes a small number of data errors and reopened cases.
For the New York duplicate analysis we classified a closure as a duplicate where the resolution description states that an earlier complaint was already received for the location. Both cities’ open complaint totals include records still open, which are excluded here by construction; a systematic difference in how long cases stay open would affect the comparison.
The largest caveat is the one that applies to all complaint data: it measures reporting, not rats. Differences between cities reflect how residents use 311 as much as conditions on the ground.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a city take to respond to a rat complaint?
In Chicago, a median of 3.7 days from complaint to closure, with 73.7 per cent closed within a week and the slowest tenth starting at 10.6 days. New York’s records show same-day closure, but that reflects the point at which 311 refers the case to the health department rather than the point at which an inspector attends.
What does it mean when a 311 rat complaint is closed?
It depends on the city. In Chicago the closure generally follows the field work. In New York it commonly records a referral to the health department, and 38.8 per cent of closed rodent complaints in 2025 were closed as duplicates of an earlier report for the same location. The resolution text published with each record is what distinguishes these.
Is New York faster than Chicago at dealing with rats?
The closure timestamps say so, and they should not be read that way. Once duplicate closures are removed, every remaining New York complaint still closes the same day at every percentile, which is not a pattern any real inspection workflow produces. The two cities’ closure fields record different events, so the numbers are not comparable.
Why was my rat complaint closed as a duplicate?
Because the city already had an open report for that address or block. It usually means the location is in the inspection queue rather than that the report was dismissed. It also means published complaint counts understate how many households reported a problem.
Sources
- NYC Open Data, 311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present, complaint type Rodent, calendar year 2025. data.cityofnewyork.us
- Chicago Data Portal, 311 Service Requests, rat and rodent request types, calendar year 2025. data.cityofchicago.org
- Analysis by The Pest Control Brief, September 2026.
