Chicago Department of Public Health – BGA Policy 2027 Budget Snapshot

As the city's point department for infectious disease response, the Chicago Department of Public Health's responsibilities and budget increased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. CDPH allocations more than quadrupled from 2020-2022, driven primarily by federal grants, before beginning to decline in 2023 and 2024 and dropping more precipitously in 2025.

Prior to the pandemic, from budget years 2011-2020, CDPH appropriations grew at an average rate of 2.3%, or 1.1% when adjusted for inflation through 2025. CDPH budgets have declined since its pandemic high point in 2022. The current proposal would decrease the department's appropriations by 0.5% from the previous year.

Estimated Fringe Costs

City budgets do not break out "fringe" pension and benefit costs for non-grant positions by department, instead grouping them together as citywide expenses under the Finance General section of the budget. To better reflect the real cost of service for departmental operations, BGA Policy has included an estimate of pension and benefit costs for the years 2018-2026, using Department of Finance fringe memos from each relevant year. An estimated fringe cost for the 2027 proposal uses the average annual rate of increase for each of the inputs into the fringe formulae.

Based on the city's fringe formulae, the CDPH fringe cost for nongrant employees averaged 3.2% from 2018-2026, compared to a citywide average of 26.8%. (Departments with a larger proportion of their budget dedicated to non-employee costs or with a larger proportion of grant-funded employees tend to have lower fringe costs, as their pension/benefit costs are either already factored into grant funds or are a smaller percentage of the overall departmental budget.)

Local Fund Actual Spend

Local fund actuals are only a limited snapshot of CPDH's overall expenditures, as in recent years the department has been heavily grant-funded. With that caveat, CDPH spent on average 79.6% of its locally funded budget from 2022-2025, compared to the citywide average 86.6% local fund spend.

Budgeted Positions & Vacancies

As with appropriations, budgeted headcount at CDPH went under a pandemic-era surge and has been declining since peaking at 2024. The proposed 2027 budget would increase budgeted headcount by 3.4% from the previous year, the first increase since 2024.

From January through September of 2026, the months for which full-time position vacancy data is currently available, CDPH averaged a 23.0% vacancy rate, compared to the citywide average of 11.2%.

89 of the department's budgeted full-time positions were persistent vacancies (defined as the number of positions within the same combination of title, subsection, section, division, department, and fund codes that remained vacant in all nine months of available data):