An Illinois FOIA request is a written request under the state’s Freedom of Information Act (5 ILCS 140) asking a government body to inspect or copy its records. You send it to the agency that holds the records, describe what you want with enough specificity to let the FOIA officer find it, and the agency has five business days to respond. You do not have to say why you want the records, and the first 50 black-and-white pages are free.
How to Submit the Request
Send your request to the public body that holds the records. Agencies must accept requests by mail, personal delivery, fax, email, or any other channel they make available to the public. An agency may offer an online portal or a preferred form, but it cannot reject your request for not using that particular form.
Write your request so the FOIA officer can identify the records without guessing. Include the date, your contact information, and a description of the records that is concrete about time period, subject, and, if you know them, the departments or individuals involved. Broad requests (“all emails from the last five years”) tend to draw delays or a claim that the request is unduly burdensome. Narrower requests move faster.
You are not required to explain your purpose. The agency may ask only two things about your motive: whether the request is for a commercial purpose, and whether you are seeking a fee waiver.
If the records exist electronically, you can ask for a specific format such as a PDF or a spreadsheet, and the agency must provide that format when feasible. When it isn’t, you get the records in whatever electronic format the agency already uses, or on paper at your option. This matters when you want data you can sort rather than a stack of printouts.
Before you send anything, check the agency’s website. Any public body with a website must post the name of its FOIA officer, the address for submitting requests, and its fee schedule. If those items are missing, that is itself worth noting.
What It Costs
The first 50 pages of black-and-white letter- or legal-sized copies are free. Beyond 50 pages, the agency cannot charge more than 15 cents per page. Color copies and non-standard sizes can be billed at the agency’s actual reproduction cost. Certifying a record costs no more than $1. The agency cannot bill you for staff time spent searching or reviewing records, unless your request is for a commercial purpose.
For electronic copies, the agency may charge only the actual cost of the recording medium, such as a disc or USB drive. The per-page paper fees do not apply.
You can ask for a fee waiver if the main purpose of your request is to share information about public health, safety, welfare, or legal rights with the general public. State your specific purpose and explain why disclosure serves the public interest. The waiver does not apply when your primary goal is personal or commercial benefit. News media organizations reporting on matters of public concern are not treated as seeking commercial benefit for waiver purposes.
Response Deadlines
The agency has five business days from receipt of your request to either provide the records or issue a written denial. Silence counts as a denial. If the agency does not respond, does not request an extension, and does not deny the request within that window, you can move directly to the appeals process.
The agency can extend the deadline by up to five additional business days for a legitimate reason: records stored elsewhere, a large volume of specified records, a needed consultation with another public body, or a review to determine whether an exemption applies. The extension notice must arrive in writing within the original five-day window, name the reason, and give you the new response date.
One provision gives agencies a real incentive to stay on schedule: if a public body misses a deadline and then provides the records anyway, it cannot charge you copying fees for those records.
When a Different Clock Applies
Three categories of request follow different rules, and it helps to know they exist before you file.
A commercial purpose request is one where any part of the records will be used to sell, resell, or advertise goods or services. The response window becomes 21 working days. News media, nonprofits, and scientific or academic organizations pursuing reporting or research are excluded from this label.
A voluminous request is one that asks for more than five categories of records within a 20-business-day period, or would require compiling more than 500 pages (unless a single document runs longer than that on its own). Voluminous requests trigger tiered electronic-copy fees: up to $20 for the first 2 megabytes (or 80 megabytes of PDFs), up to $40 for the next tier, and up to $100 beyond that. News media and academic organizations pursuing news, public-interest features, or research are again excluded.
A recurrent requester is someone who has filed, with the same public body in the prior 12 months, at least 50 requests, or at least 15 requests within any 30-day period, or at least 7 requests within any 7-day period. News media and nonprofit research organizations are not counted. Once an agency classifies you this way, it must notify you within five business days and then has 21 business days to give an initial response.
Unduly Burdensome Claims
An agency can decline a request as unduly burdensome, but only if there is no way to narrow it and the burden genuinely outweighs the public interest in the information. Before invoking this, the agency must offer to confer with you about narrowing the scope. If it still declines, the response must be in writing and explain how compliance would strain operations. That written response is treated as a denial you can appeal.
An agency that missed the initial five-day deadline, or missed the extended deadline after requesting more time, loses the right to claim the request is unduly burdensome. Delay cannot be leveraged into a refusal.
What Can Be Withheld, and What Cannot
Not every record is subject to disclosure. The Act lists dozens of exemptions. The ones you are most likely to encounter cover personal privacy, active law enforcement matters, trade secrets and confidential commercial or financial information, records barred from disclosure by other state or federal law, correctional-facility security, and attorney-client communications.
The personal privacy exemption applies only when disclosure would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy, meaning the information is highly personal or objectionable to a reasonable person and the privacy interest outweighs the public interest in the specific record. Information about how public employees and officials perform their public duties is explicitly outside this protection. Courts apply a balancing test.1Justia. Gekas v. Williamson
The law-enforcement exemption is not a blanket shield. It applies only where release would interfere with a pending investigation, reveal a confidential source, endanger someone, or deprive a person of a fair trial.
Preliminary drafts and internal recommendations can be withheld to protect the deliberative process, with one important limit: once the head of the public body publicly cites and identifies a specific record, it loses its exempt status. An agency cannot quote from an internal memo at a public meeting and then refuse to release it.
The point most often mishandled by agencies: when a record contains both exempt and non-exempt material, the agency must redact the exempt portions and release the rest. A flat denial of a document that plainly contains some public information is a signal that the agency has skipped its redaction obligation.
What a Denial Must Contain
A denial has to be in writing and has to include specific elements: the reasons for the denial, a detailed factual basis for each exemption cited, and the names and titles of everyone responsible for the decision. It must also tell you about your right to appeal to the Public Access Counselor, including the PAC’s address and phone number, and your right to seek judicial review.2Illinois General Assembly. Illinois Code 5 ILCS 140/9 – Freedom of Information Act A denial missing any of this is itself out of compliance with the statute, which is grounds for appeal on its own.
Appealing to the Public Access Counselor
The Public Access Counselor sits inside the Illinois Attorney General’s office and reviews FOIA disputes. You have 60 calendar days from the date of the denial to file a Request for Review. Submit it in writing, sign it, and include your original request and any responses from the agency.3Illinois General Assembly. Illinois Code 5 ILCS 140 – Freedom of Information Act
The PAC first decides whether the complaint has merit. If not, it closes the matter and notifies both sides. Otherwise, it forwards your complaint to the public body within seven business days and asks for the records at issue. The public body has seven business days to answer. You then have seven business days to reply if you want to.
The Attorney General must issue a binding opinion within 60 days of receiving the review request, extendable by up to 30 business days with written notice. The PAC may also resolve the matter through mediation instead of a formal opinion. Binding opinions have the force of law and can be enforced in court.
Going to Court
You do not have to go through the PAC first. Anyone denied access can file suit for injunctive or declaratory relief in the circuit court for the county where the public body is located. For state agencies, you can file where the agency has its principal office or where you live. The court reviews the matter fresh, without deferring to the agency, and can examine the disputed records privately. The burden of justifying the refusal falls on the public body. FOIA cases get priority on the court’s docket.
If you prevail, the court must award reasonable attorney fees and costs. The word is “shall,” not “may,” which lowers the financial risk of bringing suit. Fees are calibrated to how much of the relief you actually obtained compared to what you sought.
For willful and intentional violations, or conduct in bad faith, the court must also impose a civil penalty of $2,500 to $5,000 for each occurrence.4Illinois Courts. Boggan v. FOIA Office of the Department of Corrections Contempt powers are available if an agency ignores a court order to disclose.