Who is my alderman?

Chicago has 50 wards, and each one elects one member of the City Council. The tool finds the ward that covers any point in the city and names the person elected to it, with the ward office's address, phone number and email. Your ward is not your police district, your ZIP code or your community area — it is the City Council's own map, and it is the one that decides who answers your call about a pothole, a permit, a zoning change or a street closure.

Or open the map and pick your location on it:

Opens the map with the ward and voting-precinct layers on. Search your address or ZIP, or tap your location.

What the lookup shows

Alderman, alderperson, alder

You will see all three. The City Council's own usage has moved to alderperson; alderman is still what most people type into a search box, and it is the word this page is written to answer. The card uses the seat's title as the City's data publishes it. Whichever word you use, it is one seat: the member of the City Council elected from your ward, one of fifty.

Ward, precinct, police district, community area

Four Chicago maps cover the same address, and none of them share their lines.

• Ward — one of 50 City Council seats. Ward boundaries are redrawn after each decennial census, so the ward you were in a decade ago may not be the ward you are in now.
• Ward precinct — the smaller unit inside a ward that the Board of Election Commissioners runs elections in; your polling place is assigned by precinct. The map has a layer for these too: turn on the ward and its precincts together.
• Police district — one of 22 Chicago Police Department districts, each split into beats. Patrol and command, not representation; see what police district am I in?
• Community area — one of 77 planning and statistical areas with long-settled names. Not an elected district at all, though the name is often what a neighborhood calls itself.

The map shows any of these at once if you toggle their layers, which is the quickest way to see that a ward line and a police district line almost never sit on the same street.

Outside Chicago

The ward layer is not Chicago-only. Many suburbs elect their councils by ward or district, and where a municipality — or the county on its behalf — publishes that map, the same layer answers there: the suburbs of Cook County from the County's own political-boundary service, Evanston from the city's data, Will County's municipalities, and a small city like Elmwood whose wards are published by Peoria County rather than by the city itself.

The card carries whatever the publisher provides. Sometimes that is one council member with a phone number and email, sometimes two members per ward, and sometimes only the boundary. Where a suburb publishes no ward map, it simply does not get a ward card — the layer says nothing rather than guessing.

Where the data comes from

Ward boundaries come from the City of Chicago Data Portal's Boundaries – Wards dataset, and the alderperson, office address, phone, email and website from the Portal's Ward Offices dataset. Both are read live, so a change the City publishes shows up here without waiting for anyone to notice it. The seat's election cycle is refreshed weekly from the Cook County Clerk's directory of elected officials. Each suburban ward source is named on the sources & data layers page. The map is free, requires no login, and sets no tracking cookies.

Who represents each Chicago ward

All 50 seats on the Chicago City Council, as this site had them on September 11, 2026. The map above reads the same source live rather than this file, so a card can be up to a week newer than this table — which is why the table names its day. Where the roster names nobody it says so rather than guessing. Where these names come from.

Related lookups

• What district am I in?Every district for any Chicago address — ward, school board, county, state, federal.
• What police district am I in?Chicago police district and beat, the nearest station, and your Police District Council.
• Which school board district am I in?Chicago's elected Board of Education districts, with your board member.
• Who is my county commissioner?County board and commissioner districts, in Cook County and far beyond.
• What precinct am I in?Your Illinois voting precinct, its township, and the polling place where the county publishes one.