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New York City is renowned for its iconic landmarks—Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building—and world‑class cultural venues like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yet, alongside its celebrated features, the city also grapples with less glamorous challenges. Residents and visitors alike are well aware of late‑night subway crowds, soaring living costs, and one of its most persistent nuisances: the ubiquitous rat.
Rats are a common sight across New York, often seen darting along subway tunnels or lurking in storm drains clutching discarded food. Their prevalence was so pronounced that in 2023, Mayor Eric Adams appointed the city’s first rodent‑mitigation director—colloquially known as the “rat czar”—to coordinate efforts to curb the population across all five boroughs. Despite this high visibility, however, New York is not the nation’s leading rodent hotspot.
While rats are a perennial presence in NYC, one pest‑control firm’s data points to another major city—Chicago—as the United States’ most rat‑infested metropolis. How reliable is that ranking, and does New York truly trail the Windy City in rodent numbers? Let’s delve into the details.
Because there is no precise method to count wild rats in every city, pest‑control firm Orkin estimates infestation levels by tallying the number of new rodent‑treatment contracts issued over the past year. Their 2024 survey placed Chicago at the pinnacle of the U.S.’s 50 “rattiest” cities—a position it has held for a decade.
Between September 1, 2023, and August 31, 2024, Chicago logged the highest volume of residential rodent treatments nationwide, securing its tenth consecutive year at the top. Orkin attributes this trend to the city’s extensive network of alleys, subways, and underground infrastructure—ideal habitats for rats.
Los Angeles occupies second place, while New York rounds out the top three, a ranking it has maintained since 2017. Although the trio’s positions align with their notorious reputations, the methodology behind Orkin’s rankings has drawn scrutiny.
Orkin’s ranking relies solely on its own treatment data, not on independent wildlife surveys. Chicago’s Department of Streets and Sanitation spokesperson Mimi Simon told USA Today that the company’s figures cannot be used to quantify actual infestations, describing the approach as “advertising that highlights their customer base.”
Although exact counts remain elusive, Chicago’s rat problem is well documented. The city’s dominant species is the Norway rat (brown rat), introduced to America in the 1700s via maritime trade and now ubiquitous across Illinois and the nation. The Lincoln Park Zoo describes Norway rats as the most successful urban wildlife globally. A 2024 budget allocation of $14.8 million for the city’s Bureau of Rodent Control—$1.5 million above last year’s figure—signals that authorities are grappling with a persistent infestation.
New York’s own research, conducted by the Metropolitan Manhattan Pest Control in 2023, estimated about 3 million rats—up from 2 million in 2010. With a human population near 8 million, rats comprise roughly one‑third of the city’s residents. Without comprehensive, independent surveys, definitive rankings of the nation’s most rodent‑infested city remain speculative.
