Nearly half of Chicago adults say they are just scraping by financially, according to a new survey that found grocery bills, rent and stagnant wages are piling pressure on households across the city. The fall 2025 ChicagoSpeaks poll found that 43% of respondents described themselves as just getting by, while another 13% said they are finding it hard to get by altogether.
The survey, first reported by WTTW News, was commissioned by NORC at the University of Chicago and drawn from the probability-based ChicagoSpeaks panel, which is designed to represent the city's household population. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they were living comfortably, while just 5% considered themselves financially thriving, and 29% reported being unable to pay some bills or making only partial payments. WTTW reported the poll surveyed 1,108 adults with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points, though NORC's own published pulse report for the same fall 2025 period lists 1,361 completed interviews conducted between September 16 and 29, 2025, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
Vince Welch, associate director at NORC at the University of Chicago, said the numbers reflect a population stretched thin. “Most Chicagoans are managing, but they have almost no financial margin,” Welch said, adding that survey data should reach the people positioned to improve Chicagoans’ lives in order to inform policy and service delivery.
Groceries, Rent and Pay Top the List of Stressors
Per the same NORC pulse report, 58% of Chicago adults named the cost of groceries as a major source of stress, while 56% pointed to housing costs and 50% cited the amount they get paid. Confidence in handling basic financial shocks was thin across the board: only 29% of adults said they were extremely or very confident they could keep up with expenses, and just 23% felt similarly confident they could cover an unexpected medical bill.
Health care access was also a worry. Twenty-four percent of adults said there was a time in the past year when they needed medical care but could not afford it, the report found. About 3 in 10 Chicagoans received Medicaid coverage in the past year, and roughly a quarter received SNAP benefits, according to the seed reporting from WTTW News.
Job Worries Ease Slightly, But Remain Elevated
Among employed Chicago residents, 19% said job loss or layoff in the next 12 months felt very or fairly likely, a figure that WTTW reported had dropped nine percentage points since September 2025. Still, NORC's own topline data report put the share of employed adults expecting a likely layoff at 28% for that same fall 2025 survey window, underscoring how differently the figures have been presented across sources.
Kurt Miller, senior regional director at Employment & Employer Services, which manages American Job Centers in Harvey and at the King Center, said healthcare, construction, hospitality and logistics are sectors that consistently hire, and that seasonal positions can turn into full-time work. Miller advised workers not to wait for a layoff to start job hunting. “Don’t wait until you don’t have a job to look for a job,” he said, also urging employers to be flexible, describe clear career paths and communicate internal opportunities to staff.
American Job Centers, designated under the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, provide free career counseling, job training and employment-related services, and centers across the Chicago area operate within the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, which stewards federal workforce development funding. More than 4,500 customers were served through WIOA-funded programs between October 2024 and September 2025, according to the partnership.
Food Insecurity Hits South, West and Southwest Sides Hardest
Hunger has become a parallel crisis. The 2026 Hunger in Chicago Report found that 36% of Chicago households — about 417,000 households — lack consistent access to enough food, according to the Greater Chicago Food Depository. The food bank also reported that 40% of Cook County households cannot afford the basic cost of living, and that 31% of Chicagoans have delayed, reduced or skipped payments for other basic needs just to pay for food.
The burden is not spread evenly across the city. Food insecurity reaches 51% of households on the South Side, 45% on the West Side and 41% on the Southwest Side, compared with 20% on the North Side, the food depository's report found. Families with children face a greater food insecurity risk than other households, according to NORC's research on measuring food insecurity across Chicago, which surveyed 1,194 adults in English and Spanish.
Since 2021, food prices in the Chicago metro area have climbed 22% and rents have risen 31%, the food depository reported. Compounding the strain, SNAP enrollment in Cook County has dropped 23% since July 2025, leaving nearly 196,000 fewer people connected to the program. The Greater Chicago Food Depository distributes more than 100 million pounds of food annually through a network of more than 850 emergency food distribution partners and has seen rising demand for both food and public-benefits enrollment help, advocating for what it calls a robust and meaningful social safety net.
Nolan Downey, senior director of policy at the food depository, has pointed to HR1 — the 2025 budget reconciliation law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — as a factor reshaping SNAP by imposing stricter work requirements and cutting eligibility for refugees and people granted asylum. ChicagoSpeaks survey respondents generally believed federal spending on Medicaid and food and nutrition assistance was too low, with Chicago Democrats and independents more likely than Chicago Republicans to view that spending as insufficient, while Republicans were more likely to say Medicaid and SNAP spending was too high.
Evictions Concentrate on South and West Side Blocks
Housing instability tracks a similar geographic pattern. More than 40,000 eviction cases were filed with the Cook County Circuit Court between April 2022 and September 2025, including roughly 12,000 filed in 2024 alone, according to Block Club Chicago. The 60649 ZIP code, which includes South Shore, logged nearly 2,000 eviction cases — the most of any Chicago ZIP code in that span — while the 60622 ZIP code recorded just 99 evictions over the same three years, the outlet reported.
Peter Toepfer, president and CEO of All Chicago Making Homelessness History, a planning and policy body working to end homelessness in the city, said the math simply is not adding up for many residents. “People’s incomes simply are not keeping pace with the cost of living, and rent, in particular, which has climbed so much in the last several years,” Toepfer said. The organization provides emergency financial assistance for homelessness prevention, with requests averaging about $1,500 apiece, though Toepfer reported that demand for services exceeds the organization's capacity.
All Chicago has launched a program approach focused on neighborhoods with the highest eviction rates, concentrated on the city's South and West sides, and continues to advocate for increased homelessness-services funding and affordable-housing investment paired with fewer barriers to building. For residents facing eviction now, the City of Chicago's resource page lists eviction legal assistance through Cook County Legal Aid for Housing and Debt, reachable at 855.956.5763.
