The night · 872 at 17:00, 214 by 19:00
What’s still on after dark
Most of Chicago’s cheap hours are over by six, and under a quarter are left by 19:00. Here’s what keeps going, and the two reasons the rest goes dark.
After ten it’s mostly the law: Illinois doesn’t allow a discounted drink from 22:00 to close. Before ten, finding more is on us. A licence to stay open late isn’t an offer, so nothing on this page lights up the clock.
The day, hour by hour
Across the seven days, 872 places are lit at 17:00 and 214 by 19:00, under a quarter. After that the city keeps going and what we can see does not.
Each cell is the busiest minute of that hour, counting places. A column is a day, starting today. A cell is dark with nothing, dim with one, lit with more than one. The rule across 22:00 is the hour after which a drink may not be discounted at all.
The field above is the same week at every one of its 10,080 minutes. Nothing in it is smoothed: each column is one minute, counted, and it is drawn only where a browser both has a GPU and can prove it put pixels on the canvas. The grid below is the same reading rounded to hours, and it is what you get otherwise, including with no JavaScript at all.
The number on the right is that hour summed across the seven days. A dark row is an hour we have verified nothing in, anywhere on the field, on any day this week.
What the law allows after ten
Illinois legalised the happy hour in 2015 and bounded it in the same act. 235 ILCS 5/6-28.5 lets a licensee discount a drink for no more than four hours a day and fifteen a week, and not between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and the licensed premises' closing hour. It also lets a licensee offer free food or entertainment at any time.
So a cheap drink hour at midnight is not something this plate has failed to find. It is unlawful. What can lawfully run after ten is food, anything free, and a drink at its ordinary listed price, which is not a reduction and so not a happy hour at all.
Which makes 22:00 the line on the band above. The dark hours below it are the code. The thin hours from 18:00 up to it are ours: a happy hour is still lawful there and we carry 981 across the week against 872 in the single hour at 17:00.
These read as a discounted drink and run past 22:00. Three things could be true of each and we cannot tell which from the page: these are the room's listed prices rather than a reduction, which 6-28.5 allows at any hour; or our window is wrong; or the venue is outside the code. It is carried as the venue prints it and named here as a claim to re-read, never as an accusation.
The fifteen hours
6-28.5 does not only say when a drink may be discounted. It says how much: not more than four hours in a day and fifteen in a week. So every licensee in Illinois holds an allowance, and spends it somewhere. Nobody publishes what a room has left. This does, for the 148 rooms on this plate that run something we read as a reduction.
29 of them land on exactly 15. That is not a coincidence and it is the whole shape of the day above: an operator with fifteen hours to spend puts them where the after-work crowd is, which is why the evening falls off a cliff at six rather than tapering.
These read as more than the allowance. Three things could be true and we cannot tell which: our window is wider than the room actually runs, the room runs it on fewer days than it prints, or the room is over. It is a claim to re-read, never an accusation.
Only an offer classified as a reduction in the price of a drink enters this, because that is the only thing 6-28.5 governs. The classification is written into each record rather than guessed from its title, and 16 of 479 deals carry none, so they are outside this reading in either direction. Overlapping windows are counted once: a happy hour inside a longer offer is one stretch of discounted time and was being charged twice.
Bounded by what this plate can see, and grouped by the name on the door, which is the closest thing we hold to a licensee. A room with hours left here has hours left according to us, and it may well run a happy hour we have never sourced. The unspent hours are still the clearest answer to where a cheap hour could lawfully go and does not.
Stringing two together
The hours above are one room at a time. Plan the night reads them as an evening instead: what follows what, the walk in between measured, and whether the last train is still there when it ends.
The last train
After ten the binding constraint is not the price and it is not the walk to the door. It is whether you can get back. Name a destination and this page answers with the last direct train from the station nearest each room. Without one, what is measured is the scheduled service span at that station, in any direction.
66 of the 143 station records in the feed sit on a line the CTA runs around the clock and have no last train at all. That is what makes a late hour possible here. The rest have one, and a window that outlasts it is worth knowing about even though it is not proof that anybody is stranded.
You last read this to . Use it again.
These run past the last scheduled departure from the station nearest them. Not a warning about the venue and not a claim that anybody is stranded: you may be going somewhere the L does not reach, or not taking it at all. It is a fact about one timetable at one platform.
Read from the CTA schedule feed on 2026-08-29. A schedule is not a live train, and it is a promise about an ordinary night. A station counts as all-night only when the CTA runs that line around the clock and the schedule agrees: asking the schedule alone marked 79 stations, thirteen of them on lines that stop overnight. A deal with no position is not measured, because a distance with no source is not published here.
Licensed past two
Chicago issues a Late Hour licence separately from the licence to sell drink at all: it is what lets a room stay open past the ordinary close. There are 116 of them active in the whole city, 95 of them on plates we already carry. That makes late night the one part of this plate with a finite list rather than a search. What we would be looking for in these rooms is food and what is free, because that is what the code leaves after ten.
We carry 18. The rest is not a claim that they run a cheap hour, only that if any of them do, this is where it would be, and we have not read their page yet. Names are the city's, as the city writes them.
The licence record carries no website, so a sweep guesses a domain from each name and checks the page is really that room. 29 of them answer, and 8 print enough of a window and a price to be worth opening. That is the shortlist a person actually reads. The sweep never writes a deal.
Know what one of these runs after ten? Send the source. A window with an end on it is the whole requirement, and the method is the same as for every other deal we carry.
What this is not
Not a nightlife guide and not a list of what is open. A Late Hour licence says a room may serve late, not that it does tonight, and never that it is cheap. The reading of the code above is ours, from the statute itself, and it is not legal advice. Read from the city licence record on 2026-08-28, counting only licences that are active and have not expired. The desk carries the rest of what this plate cannot confirm about itself.