Streaming Thanksgiving football comes with extra costs just for living in Chicago. The city adds 10% to streaming prices through a local amusement tax.
Streaming NFL games this holiday season comes with high taxes if you live in Chicago, but why city leaders should get paid so you can enjoy football from the comfort of your living room is a fair question.
Watching every game on Thanksgiving and Black Friday with YouTube TV, Peacock, Paramount+, Amazon and Prime accounts comes with an extra 10.25% charge atop the monthly costs of the services. That’s over $11 in November if you subscribe to them all.
Chicago treats at-home streaming the same as attending a ticketed entertainment event, which is what the amusement tax was originally meant for. The city expanded “amusement” in 2015 to include streaming services. But that comparison doesn’t hold up.
An amusement tax on a live sporting event is partially because the city must provide police for crowd control and public transportation to the event. Watching Thanksgiving football from a living room doesn’t have those expenses. How can you charge an amusement tax for someone staying at home?
And it’s never enough. The tax went up from 9% to 10.25% at the start of 2025. The cost to the city is the same whether the viewer has one or five streaming subscriptions: the city isn’t an internet service provider.
The result is a growing gap between what the city takes from taxpayers compared to the service it provides them. Streaming taxes are just another layer to the cost-of-living, which gives Chicagoans another reason to leave the city.
