Chicago's Most-Doubled Ticket Is Also Its Worst-Collected

The $200 No City Sticker ticket gets doubled more than any common violation, yet the city collects barely half of its face value.

Built from Chicago’s own hearing records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Last updated September 4, 2026.

The Chicago ticket the city doubles more than any other common violation is also the one it collects the least. The No City Sticker ticket carries a $200 average face fine and gets doubled for non-payment at a rate of 53.1%. And of all that money owed, only 50.3% is ever collected — the lowest collection rate in the whole ticket book. Across 885,786 of these tickets, the city has $87,960,703.13 in face value it never collected.

You would expect the opposite. Doubling a fine looks like pressure to pay. So you'd guess the most-doubled ticket is the one the city is best at collecting. In the records, that's not what happens.

The surprise: half of it never comes in

Compare the No City Sticker ticket to the automated speed-camera ticket for going 6–10 mph over. That camera ticket has a $35 average face fine and a collection rate of 89.4%. The No City Sticker ticket, at $200, collects 50.3%.

The small automated fine gets paid. The big, aggressively doubled one leaves a $88 million pile of uncollected face value.

What the records do and don't show

It is tempting to say the doubling causes the non-payment — that inflating the fine to $200, then to more, is what turns it into uncollectable debt. The records do not show that. They show two things sitting together: this ticket is the most doubled, and it is the least collected. They do not tell us why.

The honest reading is a correlation, not a mechanism. It is entirely possible that both the high doubling rate and the low collection rate come from the same underlying thing — who tends to get these tickets, and whether they can pay $200 in the first place. A camera ticket and a sticker ticket land on different people in different situations. The data here cannot separate the fine amount from the driver's ability to pay. So I'll state only what was measured: the most-doubled common ticket is also the worst-collected.

The year-by-year slide, and its catch

Looked at by year, the No City Sticker collection rate drops sharply: 63.8% for 2020, down to 35.4% for 2025.

That looks like a clean decline. It probably isn't — at least not entirely. A 2020 ticket has had five years for payments to trickle in. A 2025 ticket is young. Of course less of a young ticket has been collected; there simply hasn't been time. This is called a maturation effect, and it alone could produce a falling-looking line even if nothing changed.

I did not correct for it here — I can't turn these two published numbers into an age-matched comparison without deriving new figures I'm not permitted to print. So take the year numbers for what they honestly are: consistent with a real decline, and consistent with tickets simply not having aged yet. The all-years collection rate of 50.3% is the sturdier figure.

A different lens on a ticket we've covered before

We've written before that No City Sticker tickets are among the most winnable by mail — about 79% of mailed challenges end with the driver found not liable, meaning the hearing officer ruled for the driver. That earlier piece was about whether you can beat the ticket.

This is a different question. This is about the money: how doubled this fine gets, and how little of it the city ever collects. Same violation, new lens — the economics of escalation and collection, not the odds at a hearing.

If you're holding one of these right now

Here is the honest picture. The No City Sticker ticket is the one the city is worst at collecting and most aggressive at doubling. Half of the face value on this category is never collected at full amount.

That doesn't mean your ticket goes away if you wait. Ignoring it is what triggers the doubling in the first place — an unpaid ticket doubles 25 days after the city decides you're liable. The deadline, not the ticket, is what turns $200 into more.

What it does mean is that this is a category where contesting is worth taking seriously. Registration tickets like this are the most winnable kind by mail, usually because a driver can show they were actually current. If you had a valid sticker, the document that proves it is your strongest move. If you didn't, be careful: hearing officers treat an honest admission — "I hadn't renewed yet" — as establishing the violation. No number here promises an outcome. But of all the tickets to fight rather than quietly pay, this is one where the odds and the economics both point the same way.

WITH v AS (SELECT i.violation_desc, SUM(i.base_issued) AS issued, SUM(c.collected) AS collected, SUM(i.n_all) AS n, SUM(i.n_escalated) AS esc FROM issued_by_year_viol i JOIN rev_by_year_viol c ON i.yr=c.yr AND i.violation_desc=c.violation_desc WHERE i.base_issued>0 GROUP BY i.violation_desc) SELECT violation_desc, n, ROUND(issued/n,0) avg_face_fine, ROUND(100.0*esc/n,1) escalate_pct, ROUND(100.0*collected/issued,1) collect_pct FROM v WHERE n>100000 ORDER BY escalate_pct DESC LIMIT 20sql

SELECT i.yr, i.n_all n, ROUND(100.0*i.n_escalated/i.n_all,1) escalate_pct, ROUND(100.0*c.collected/i.base_issued,1) collect_pct FROM issued_by_year_viol i JOIN rev_by_year_viol c ON i.yr=c.yr AND i.violation_desc=c.violation_desc WHERE i.violation_desc='NO CITY STICKER VEHICLE UNDER/EQUAL TO 16,000 LBS.' ORDER BY i.yrsql

SELECT SUM(i.base_issued) face_issued, SUM(c.collected) collected, SUM(i.base_issued)-SUM(c.collected) uncollected FROM issued_by_year_viol i JOIN rev_by_year_viol c ON i.yr=c.yr AND i.violation_desc=c.violation_desc WHERE i.violation_desc='NO CITY STICKER VEHICLE UNDER/EQUAL TO 16,000 LBS.'sql