Bathroom remodel in Chicago, in the city with more lead service lines than any other

Chicago runs its own Department of Buildings, its own plumbing code, and — since November 2023 — its own rebuilt permit system, none of which map cleanly onto how this works in New York or Los Angeles. The city also carries a specific, well-documented legacy that shapes almost any plumbing conversation here: its own code required lead service lines on new construction until the day the federal government banned them nationwide in 1986, longer than any other major American city kept the requirement on the books. None of that makes a Chicago bathroom harder to do well. It means the honest version of this project starts with what's actually running to the house, not just what's behind the tile.

Chicago's housing stock, in the actual numbers

The Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey puts Chicago at roughly 1.28 million housing units citywide. A meaningful share of that stock is genuinely old and genuinely specific to this city's building types: the Chicago Bungalow Association puts the city's "Bungalow Belt" at roughly 80,000 brick bungalows built between 1910 and the mid-1930s, close to a third of Chicago's single-family housing stock, concentrated in a ring through the city's southwest and northwest sides. DePaul University's Institute for Housing Studies, which tracks this kind of data specifically, puts two-to-four-unit buildings — mostly the classic Chicago two-flat — at more than a quarter of the city's total housing, with a median building age of 108 years. Separately, the Census Bureau's 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates put the median year a Chicago housing unit was built at 1953.

What that means for a remodel: in a two-flat, the owner usually owns the whole building outright — there is rarely a co-op or condo board involved the way there is in a converted high-rise — but the waste stack and wet wall are still frequently shared between the owner's unit and the unit they rent out upstairs or downstairs, the same as a shared stack in any multi-unit building. And a bungalow or two-flat built in the 1910s through 1950s is a reasonable bet for a supply line that has never been touched, which matters here for a specific reason covered below. Ask a contractor directly whether your plan touches a shared stack, and what they expect to find once a wall is open.

Chicago rebuilt its permit shortcut in 2023 — the Easy Permit Process is gone

For years, homeowners doing a straightforward Chicago remodel used what the city called the Easy Permit Process, which let a contractor skip the plan-review step for small, non-structural jobs. That program closed to new applications at 4:00 p.m. on November 2, 2023. On November 6, 2023, the Department of Buildings launched its replacement, the Express Permit Program — a fully online system that folded in the old Easy Permit Process, the plumbing/ventilation/refrigeration "short form" track, and the separate Solar Express program into one process, and the city expanded it further in September 2024. If a contractor or a blog post still describes Chicago's "Easy Permit," they are describing something that has not existed since 2023.

The Express Permit Program covers plumbing work up to a specific, checkable threshold: the Department of Buildings' own guidance caps eligible work at 5 Water Supply Fixture Units (WSFU) of added demand, and gives a concrete example — adding a private bathroom counts as 4 WSFU. In practice, that means most straightforward bathroom remodels, including adding a bathroom where none existed, fit under the Express Permit cap and can be filed online without a plan-review appointment. A project that reconfigures multiple fixture groups at once, or that is part of a larger addition, is the kind of job that crosses into Chicago's standard plan-based review instead — ask your contractor directly which track they are filing under, since the two run on different timelines.

Your plumber needs a Chicago bond, not just a license — and the homeowner exemption is narrower than people assume

No permit is issued in Chicago for plumbing work except to a plumbing contractor who holds both a state plumbing license, issued by the Illinois Department of Public Health, and the city's own contractor registration and bond with the Department of Buildings. A general remodeler who is excellent at tile and vanities cannot pull this part of the permit unless they personally hold both, or unless a licensed, bonded plumbing contractor is attached to the job.

Chicago does carve out a homeowner exemption, and it is narrower than most homeowners assume: the city's own guidance limits it to the owner, occupant, or lessee of a detached single-family residence doing the plumbing work personally, and it does not let that person hire anyone except a licensed plumbing contractor to do it for them. Given that more than a quarter of Chicago's housing sits in two-to-four-unit buildings, that exemption simply does not apply to most owners of a two-flat or three-flat — if that's your building, a licensed plumbing contractor is not optional. The city runs a public lookup at webapps1.chicago.gov/licensedcontractors where you can confirm any contractor's trade license before signing anything.

What Chicago actually charges — and why the formula looks nothing like New York's

Chicago does not price a permit off your declared construction cost the way New York City does. Plan-based permit fees here run on a formula set out in Municipal Code §13-32-310 — a construction-type factor multiplied by a scope-of-review factor multiplied by the project's area — which is a genuinely different system, not just different numbers. For narrower plumbing-only work that does not need a full plan review, the city's stand-alone fee schedule prices it by scope rather than by job cost: repairing or replacing a fixture in place without opening a wall runs $75 per dwelling unit or toilet room, while repairing or replacing piping or a riser within an existing chase runs $150 per dwelling unit. For work that clears the Express Permit Program described above, published fee breakdowns of the city's current fee tables put a typical non-structural bathroom or kitchen remodel permit at roughly $325 total.

Fee schedules change, and Chicago reviews this one on a cycle — confirm the current numbers before you budget them rather than trust a figure repeated on a contractor's blog. The Department of Buildings' permit office is at 121 N. LaSalle St., Room 900, Chicago, IL 60602, reachable at (312) 744-3449, with walk-in help available at the 9th-floor front desk Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. A quote that bundles "permits" into one vague line, instead of naming which of these it's actually filing, has not done this math.

More lead service lines than any other US city, and the reason is specifically Chicago's

This is the fact that separates a Chicago bathroom remodel from almost any other city in this network. Until the federal government banned lead water pipes nationwide in 1986, Chicago's own plumbing code required new construction to use lead for the service line connecting a house to the water main — longer than any other major American city kept that requirement on its books, a policy widely tied to the political influence the city's plumbers' union held at City Hall for decades. The result: the Environmental Defense Fund's own ranking of U.S. cities by lead service line count puts Chicago first, with roughly 400,000 lines, more than double the next city on the list.

The city's own numbers, obtained by Grist, Inside Climate News and WBEZ through a public records request of the Department of Water Management's April 2025 inventory filed with the Illinois EPA, put it more precisely: an estimated 412,000 of Chicago's roughly 491,000 total water service lines — about 84 percent citywide — are lead or lead-tainted. Under the EPA's 2024 federal rule, most cities have 10 years to replace every lead line; Chicago was granted 20, and the replacement plan the city itself submitted to the state stretches toward 2076.

To be precise about what this does and does not mean for your bathroom: a service line is the pipe between the street main and the building, not the supply line inside your bathroom wall, and a routine bathroom remodel does not by itself trigger its replacement. But if your house or two-flat was built before 1986 — which, given a citywide median build year of 1953, describes most of Chicago's housing — it's reasonable to assume you have one until you confirm otherwise. The Department of Water Management runs an Equity Lead Service Line Replacement Program offering free replacement to income-qualified owners of a single-family home or two-flat, and a separate Homeowner-Initiated Replacement Program that waives permit fees for an owner who hires their own contractor to do it; both are detailed at leadsafechicago.org, or by calling 311. If your contractor is already opening a wall for the remodel, it's a reasonable moment to ask where your service line actually stands.

What a Chicago bathroom remodel actually costs — and the one source built for this question

Unlike several cities in this network, there is a genuinely rigorous, disclosed-methodology source for this question, and Chicago is large enough that it gets its own line in it. Remodeling/Zonda's 2025 Cost vs. Value report — which surveys remodeling contractors for typical project cost and real-estate professionals for resale value, market by market — puts a midrange bathroom remodel in the Chicago market at $24,910 to complete, recouping $17,662 at resale, a 70.9 percent return. That's a real number with a stated methodology behind it, and it's worth knowing it exists before you accept a number from a site that won't say where its figure came from.

It comes with one honest caveat: Zonda's "Chicago" market blends the city with its suburbs across the wider metro area, so it is not a city-of-Chicago-only figure, and it runs noticeably below the roughly 80 percent ROI the same report finds nationally for a midrange bathroom remodel — a gap worth asking your contractor about rather than assuming away. Meanwhile, the lead-generation sites that dominate this search disagree with each other by a wide margin and disclose no methodology at all: one survey-based calculator puts the Chicago average at $10,939, another figure drawn from the same underlying source elsewhere puts it at $13,484 to $16,500, and separate contractor blog posts quote $20,000 to $45,000-plus for what they call the same project. What actually drives the real number in Chicago is whether your service line and supply lines are original, whether the job fits the Express Permit Program's 5-WSFU cap or needs full plan review, and whether a shared stack in a two-flat is part of the scope. Our bathroom remodel cost guide covers how to read a quote against those specifics instead of an average.

ZIP codes we cover in Chicago

60601, 60602, 60603, 60604, 60605, 60606, 60607, 60608, 60609, 60610, 60611, 60612, 60613, 60614, 60615, 60616, 60617, 60618, 60619, 60620, 60621, 60622, 60623, 60624, 60625, 60626, 60628, 60629, 60630, 60631, 60632, 60633, 60634, 60636, 60637, 60638, 60639, 60640, 60641, 60642, 60643, 60644, 60645, 60646, 60647, 60648, 60649, 60651, 60652, 60653, 60654, 60655, 60656, 60657, 60658, 60659, 60660, 60661

Common questions

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