For Immediate Release: October 29, 2025
Media Contact: Ishan Daya, [email protected], 312.404.6852
Community Safety Surcharge Less Than a Rounding Error Compared to Trump Tax Cuts For Chicago’s Largest Payers
The top 20 largest public companies in Chicago that would pay the proposed Community Safety Surcharge receive nearly $60 billion in annual tax breaks from the recently extended federal income tax cuts and will pay on average less than 1/1000 of their tax subsidies towards the new charge according to an analysis by Institute for the Public Good.
The Surcharge is a $21 per month per employee fee on companies with more than 100 full-time employees that spend >50% of their work time in Chicago. Collectively the top 20 companies earn $323 billion in post-tax profit each year and will contribute around 20% of the collections which will go to fund youth jobs, violence intervention, gender based-violence support, mental health support for first responders, and other community safety interventions.
“The number one ask from the business community has been to continue to make strides in decreasing crime and increasing public safety…this surcharge brings that ask into policy,” said Ishan Daya, Co-Executive Director of the Institute for the Public Good. “The reality is that this contribution towards community safety won’t even be a blip on their P&L compared to not passing it and pushing the cost onto already overburdened working families that contribute a higher percent of their earnings to the budget.”
“The notion that local taxation has a direct impact on employment growth has been disproven time and time again. The data just isn’t there. There was no spurt of growth when Rahm repealed the head tax, and in fact, the Congressional Research Service found that the biggest impacts to employment growth are investments in low and medium-income people,” said Julie Dworkin, Co-Executive Director of the Institute for the Public Good.
Chicago is an outlier when it comes to local taxation of corporations with none of its current taxation mechanisms focused solely on businesses. Many other large cities have more flexibility when it comes to taxing corporations and have enacted various forms of corporate taxes leading to higher local taxation.
The Community Safety Surcharge amounts to a significantly smaller tax when compared to other cities local corporate taxes and will equal less than .06% of these large businesses in Chicago. Even with the charge added in, Chicago is in the bottom half of U.S. cities with the largest economies in corporate taxation.
Institute for the Public Good is a non-partisan policy institute that strengthens the public good by releasing research and supporting legislative efforts that advance racial equity and economic justice. We define a public good as a resource, service, or benefit that is accessible to everyone in society, and is supported through public funding and operation. Expansion of the public good is necessary in creating a society that supports the basic needs of everyone within it, while creating and sustaining robust services that work effectively for all of us.