Illinois Public Records Laws: The Illinois FOIA (5 ILCS 140) Explained

Illinois calls its open-records law the Freedom of Information Act, the same name as the federal statute, but it is a separate state law codified at 5 ILCS 140/1 et seq. A public body generally has 5 business days to respond, the first 50 pages of standard copies are free, and denials can be appealed to a state office with power to issue a legally binding opinion.

Information last verified on 2026-08-04. This article has not yet been reviewed by a licensed lawyer.

This page covers Illinois state law only. For requests to a federal agency such as the FBI, the Social Security Administration, or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, see our guide on how to file a FOIA request, and compare other states on the public records laws by state hub.

What Law Governs Public Records in Illinois

The Illinois Freedom of Information Act, 5 ILCS 140/1 et seq., governs access to records held by Illinois state agencies, counties, municipalities, school districts, park districts, public universities, and other public bodies. The Act starts from a presumption of openness: records in the possession of a public body are public unless a specific exemption applies, and the public body carries the burden of proving the exemption.

The shared name causes real confusion. Illinois FOIA is a state law. It does not reach federal agencies, and the federal FOIA does not reach Illinois agencies. If you want your FBI file, your Social Security earnings record, or your immigration A-file, you file under the federal statute with that agency. If you want a Chicago police report, a school district's contracts, or a village board's emails, you file under 5 ILCS 140.

Illinois FOIA also does not cover the courts. Court files and case records are administered by the circuit clerks and the Illinois Supreme Court's own access rules, not by the Freedom of Information Act.

Who Can File an Illinois FOIA Request

Any person may request records under Illinois FOIA. There is no citizenship requirement, no residency requirement, and no requirement that you live in the county or district whose records you want. Businesses, journalists, out-of-state researchers, and people who simply want a copy of their own file all use the same statute.

You also do not have to explain yourself, with two exceptions. Under 5 ILCS 140/3(c), a public body may not require a requester to specify the purpose of a request, except when it is determining whether the request is for a commercial purpose, or whether to grant a request for a fee waiver. Those are the only two carve-outs in the subsection, and both are narrow. Commercial requests get a different clock and a different fee schedule. A public-interest fee waiver under 5 ILCS 140/6(c) requires you to state your specific purpose anyway, so that second exception is one you trigger yourself by asking for the waiver.

That single exception is worth answering honestly. Misrepresenting a commercial request as a non-commercial one is treated as a violation of the Act, and it can cost you the free-page allowance and the faster deadline.

Illinois FOIA Deadlines

A public body must generally respond within 5 business days after it receives a written request. Responding means granting the request, denying it in writing with the specific exemption relied on, or asserting one of the statutory extensions. In the ordinary case the response and the production happen together, which makes Illinois faster on paper than most states.

The body may extend the deadline by up to 5 additional business days for one of seven reasons listed in 5 ILCS 140/3(e), such as records stored off site, a voluminous request, or a need to consult another agency. The extension has to be in writing, and it has to state the reason and the new date. Longer timelines are possible only by written agreement with you.

Two request categories run on a different clock. A request the body determines is for a commercial purpose gets 21 working days. A person the body has designated a recurrent requester gets a notice within 5 business days and a response within 21 business days.

A third track exists for size. Under 5 ILCS 140/3.6, a public body may designate a request voluminous, which triggers its own notice requirements, an extended response period, and the separate fee scale in 5 ILCS 140/6(a-5). You are entitled to narrow the request in response to that designation, and narrowing it is usually the right move.

If a public body simply misses the deadline and says nothing, the Act treats that silence as a denial, which opens your appeal rights immediately. A body in that position also may not charge fees for records it later produces. Those are the operative timelines as of August 2026.

What Illinois FOIA Requests Cost

Illinois has one of the more requester-friendly fee structures in the country, and readers who assume every state charges from page one are usually surprised.

• The first 50 pages of black-and-white, letter-size or legal-size copies are free to every requester, regardless of purpose.
• After the first 50 pages, the body may charge up to 15 cents per page for those standard copies.
• Color copies and non-standard sizes are billed at actual cost, not at the 15-cent cap.
• For records delivered electronically, the body may charge only the actual cost of the recording medium, such as a disc or drive. The per-page paper schedule does not carry over to an email or a download.
• Commercial-purpose requests can carry search, retrieval, and redaction charges of up to $10 per hour beyond the first 8 hours of work, under 5 ILCS 140/6(f). That hourly charge is tied to commercial requests, not to requests from a designated recurrent requester.
• A request designated voluminous under 5 ILCS 140/3.6 runs on the separate fee scale in 5 ILCS 140/6(a-5), and the dollar thresholds depend on the file format. For voluminous electronic records delivered as PDFs, a public body may charge up to $20 for the first 80 megabytes of data, up to $40 for more than 80 but not more than 160 megabytes, and up to $100 for more than 160 megabytes. For voluminous electronic records not in PDF format, the thresholds are far lower: up to $20 for the first 2 megabytes, up to $40 for more than 2 but not more than 4 megabytes, and up to $100 for more than 4 megabytes.

Illinois does have a public-interest fee waiver, and it is written into the statute. Under 5 ILCS 140/6(c), documents shall be furnished without charge or at a reduced charge if the person requesting the documents states the specific purpose for the request and indicates that a waiver or reduction of the fee is in the public interest.

The Act defines that public interest rather than leaving it open. The waiver is in the public interest where the principal purpose of the request is to access and disseminate information regarding the health, safety and welfare or the legal rights of the general public, and is not for the principal purpose of personal or commercial benefit. The carve-out inside 6(c) is narrower than it is often described: it covers news media only. The subsection says that for its purposes, commercial benefit shall not apply to requests made by news media when the principal purpose of the request is to access and disseminate information regarding the health, safety, and welfare or the legal rights of the general public.

Non-profit, scientific, and academic organizations are protected by a different provision, and against a different term. Under 5 ILCS 140/2(c-10), requests by news media and by non-profit, scientific, or academic organizations are not treated as made for a commercial purpose when the principal purpose is the news, academic, scientific, or public-interest use the definition lists. Parallel exclusions appear in 5 ILCS 140/2(g) for recurrent requesters and 5 ILCS 140/2(h) for voluminous requests. Commercial purpose and 6(c)'s commercial benefit are separate tests, so those exclusions keep a non-profit or university off the 21-working-day commercial clock and its hourly fees without automatically deciding the fee-waiver question under 6(c).

Two things follow for a requester. You have to ask, and you have to say why: state the specific purpose in the request itself and state plainly that a waiver or reduction is in the public interest. And the public body sets the amount, since the statute directs it to furnish records without charge or at a reduced charge, leaving where inside that range to land in the body's hands. Between that waiver, the first-50-pages-free rule, and the electronic-delivery rule, an Illinois requester with a genuine public-interest purpose has more cost protection than most states offer.

The cheapest lever most requesters never pull is format. Asking for records in electronic form, delivered by email, frequently drops the bill to nothing.

How to File an Illinois FOIA Request

There is no central Illinois records portal. You file with the individual public body that holds the records, which means identifying the right agency first.

1. Identify the correct public body. Each one designates a FOIA officer, and most publish that officer's name, address, and email on their website.
2. Put the request in writing. Email is fine and is the usual method. A written request is what starts the 5-business-day clock.
3. Describe the records with enough detail that the body can find them. Date ranges, department names, incident numbers, and contract numbers all help. FOIA obliges a body to produce existing records. It does not oblige it to answer questions or to create a document that does not exist.
4. State the format you want. Ask for electronic delivery if you want to avoid copy charges.
5. Say whether the request is for a commercial purpose, since the body is entitled to ask anyway.
6. Keep the sent date and any acknowledgment. Your appeal rights run off those dates.

Our free FOIA request generator builds an Illinois-specific request letter with the statutory citation and deadline language filled in. Nothing you type into it is stored or transmitted.

Exemptions Under Illinois FOIA

The exemptions live mainly in 5 ILCS 140/7 and 140/7.5. Section 7 contains the general exemptions: personal information whose release would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, preliminary drafts and deliberative material, records relating to the adjudication of employee grievances, trade secrets and commercial information, certain security-related records, and records of active law-enforcement investigations where disclosure would interfere with a proceeding.

Section 7.5 is the exemption-by-cross-reference list. It exempts records that other Illinois statutes prohibit from disclosure, which is how a great deal of specialized material such as student records, medical information, and certain law-enforcement recordings stays outside FOIA's reach.

Exemptions apply to material, not to whole files. If a record contains exempt and non-exempt information, the public body must redact the exempt portion and release the rest, and it must tell you what it redacted and under which exemption.

Police Records and Body Camera Footage

Ordinary police reports in Illinois are requested under FOIA like any other record, subject to the law-enforcement exemptions in 5 ILCS 140/7(1)(d) for material that would interfere with a pending proceeding, identify a confidential source, or endanger someone.

Body-worn camera footage is different. Illinois FOIA does not decide access to it directly. Section 7.5 of the Act exempts records prohibited from disclosure under the Law Enforcement Officer-Worn Body Camera Act, 50 ILCS 706/10-20, and that Act supplies the rules.

Under the Attorney General's published guidance on law-enforcement video, the structure works like this. Body camera recordings are generally exempt from FOIA disclosure unless the recording falls into one of the categories the Body Camera Act makes disclosable. Those categories turn on whether the encounter was flagged, meaning something such as a use of force, a formal complaint against the officer, a weapon discharge, or an arrest or detention occurred, and on who is asking. A recording is disclosable to the subject of the encounter, that person's attorney or legal representative, the officer who wore the camera, and the officer's legal representative. Even a disclosable recording can still be redacted or withheld to the extent another FOIA exemption applies.

The practical consequence: being the person in the video is the strongest available basis for getting it. If you are the subject of the encounter, say so explicitly in the request and identify yourself, rather than filing an anonymous request for the same footage.

Dashcam video, 911 audio, and computer-aided dispatch records travel on their own tracks. Our page on whether 911 calls are public records covers the recording-and-transcript distinction that trips up most requesters.

Appealing a Denial: The Public Access Counselor

This is where Illinois genuinely stands apart. Most states give you an attorney general who can write an advisory letter and a courthouse. Illinois gives you an office that can order disclosure.

The Public Access Counselor sits within the Illinois Attorney General's office. If a public body denies your request, you may file a Request for Review with the PAC within 60 calendar days. Under 5 ILCS 140/9.5(a) that window runs from the date of the final denial, which matters when a public body issues an initial denial and then a second one after an internal review. The PAC has several possible responses under 5 ILCS 140/9.5:

• Decline further review, if the matter is outside its authority or plainly unfounded.
• Mediate the dispute or issue a non-binding determination letter, which is how most matters end.
• Issue a binding opinion resolving the dispute. The PAC must issue a binding opinion within 60 calendar days of receiving the Request for Review, extendable by 30 business days with written notice.

A binding opinion that orders disclosure is enforceable. The public body's only route around it is administrative review in circuit court under 5 ILCS 140/11.5. If the body neither appeals nor complies, the Attorney General may sue to enforce the opinion.

One category of requester is shut out of this route. Under 5 ILCS 140/9.5(b), a person whose request a public body has treated as a request for a commercial purpose may not file a Request for Review, except to contest the public body's determination that the request was in fact for a commercial purpose. A commercial requester who disagrees with a substantive denial goes to court instead.

You are not required to use the PAC at all. Under 5 ILCS 140/11, a requester may file suit directly in circuit court for injunctive or declaratory relief. Note the interaction: filing suit terminates a pending PAC Request for Review, so it is one path or the other rather than both at once.

Most requesters should try the PAC first. It costs nothing, requires no lawyer, and the review process itself resolves a large share of disputes without any opinion being issued.

Records Illinois FOIA Does Not Reach

Several records people expect to obtain through FOIA run through separate systems entirely.

Birth, death, and marriage certificates are vital records administered by the Illinois Department of Public Health and local registrars, with statutory eligibility limits on who may receive a certified copy. They are not FOIA records. Our Illinois death records guide covers who qualifies and how to order.

Deeds, mortgages, and land records are held by county recorders and searched through those offices, as covered in our Illinois property records guide. Court case files, including warrants, are circuit clerk records; see Illinois warrant search for how those are accessed.

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Disclaimer

This article provides general legal information about the Illinois Freedom of Information Act as of August 2026. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Statutes, fee schedules, and agency procedures change. If a public records dispute affects your legal rights, consult an attorney licensed in Illinois about your specific situation.

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Last updated: 2026-08-04.