An analysis of 23,133 pothole reports in the city's own 311 data: how long they take to close, and what changes that.
Half of the pothole reports Kansas City marks resolved are closed within 10 days of being filed. That median is the most useful single number, because the average, 22.4 days, is pulled up by a few hundred tickets that sat open for months, and in some cases for more than a year.
The picture has also changed recently. Reports filed in 2026 are being closed much faster than in either of the two previous years: a median of 5 days, compared with 13 in 2024 and 12.5 in 2025. Timing matters too. Reports filed in late winter, when potholes are at their worst, wait the longest.
Everything below comes from Kansas City's public 311 dataset, the same records behind the lookup map. We pulled these figures on September 10, 2026; the most recent report included was filed September 7. The numbers will shift as new reports arrive and old ones close.
The city's current pothole category, "A Pothole," holds 23,133 reports. That category began in December 2023, so this analysis starts there: one report dates from December 2023, and the rest run from January 2024 through early September 2026. Older reports were filed as "Street Maintenance – Pothole," and about 1,300 more kept that label from December 2023 through 2024. We left those out; they closed on a similar schedule (an average of 24 days), so including them wouldn't change the picture. Of the 23,133, 18,395 (79.5%) are resolved, 4,537 (19.6%) are canceled, and 201 (0.9%) are still open.
Unless noted, the repair times below are for resolved reports, using the city's own days_to_close field. Three limits are worth keeping in mind. That field records when the ticket was closed, which is not necessarily when asphalt went into the hole. "Resolved" is the city's description of its own work. And one pothole can generate several tickets. Understanding the 311 data covers these limits in detail. They matter for any single ticket, but they don't erase the broad patterns.
This table shows how many of the 18,395 resolved reports were closed within each time frame, counted from the day the report was filed.
| Closed within | Reports | Share of resolved |
|---|---|---|
| Same day | 279 | 1.5% |
| 1 day | 1,428 | 7.8% |
| 3 days | 3,838 | 20.9% |
| 7 days | 7,763 | 42.2% |
| 14 days | 11,432 | 62.1% |
| 30 days | 14,879 | 80.9% |
| 60 days | 17,186 | 93.4% |
| 90 days | 17,871 | 97.2% |
| More than 90 days | 524 | 2.8% |
| More than a year | 170 | 0.9% |
About one resolved report in five closes within three days, and four in five close within a month. Same-day closures are rare. The slow end is small but real: 524 resolved reports took longer than 90 days, and 170 took longer than a year.
The overall numbers blend three quite different years. Split out by the year a report was filed, they look like this:
| Year filed | Reports | Resolved | Canceled | Median days | Average days | Closed within 7 days | Closed within 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 8,550 | 7,393 | 1,147 (13.4%) | 13 | 32.8 | 33.4% | 73.5% |
| 2025 | 9,709 | 6,752 | 2,941 (30.3%) | 12.5 | 20.5 | 35.9% | 77.8% |
| 2026 (through Sept. 7) | 4,873 | 4,249 | 449 (9.2%) | 5 | 7.3 | 67.6% | 98.6% |
Part of that gap could be an artifact of timing, since 2026 doesn't yet include a fall or early winter. So compare like with like. For reports filed January through August of each year, the median was 14 days in 2024, 15 days in 2025, and 5 days in 2026. The share closed within a week more than doubled, from 31.6% and 30.1% to 67.5%.
Another possible artifact is that slow 2026 reports just haven't closed yet, so they don't show up. That can't explain the gap either. Only 114 reports filed between January and August 2026 are still open, and even if every one of them were counted as taking longer than five days, the median for that period would still be 5.
The 311 records can't say why things sped up. More crews, a different workflow, a milder winter, or a change in how promptly tickets are closed out in the system could each play a part. One contributor is visible, though: 2026 has been a lighter year. The city received 4,797 pothole reports from January through August 2026, against 8,500 in the same months of 2025 and 7,461 in 2024. Fewer reports means a shorter queue.
Pothole reports are heavily seasonal. Across 2024 and 2025, February and March alone produced 6,807 of the 18,259 reports filed, or 37%, while October and November together produced 1,027. The cause is mostly weather: freeze-thaw cycles break pavement apart in late winter (why Kansas City has so many potholes explains the mechanics). The table below uses only 2024 and 2025, the two complete years, so 2026's faster times don't skew the months they cover.
| Month filed | Reports | Median days (resolved) | Closed within 7 days | Closed within 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 2,286 | 9 | 43.4% | 78.1% |
| February | 3,624 | 20 | 25.4% | 64.7% |
| March | 3,183 | 16 | 26.1% | 73.0% |
| April | 1,936 | 14 | 29.1% | 76.4% |
| May | 1,816 | 21 | 20.9% | 61.7% |
| June | 1,311 | 14 | 31.0% | 81.4% |
| July | 1,022 | 9 | 42.2% | 90.2% |
| August | 783 | 8 | 45.5% | 88.7% |
| September | 625 | 8 | 46.7% | 87.7% |
| October | 534 | 5 | 64.7% | 87.0% |
| November | 493 | 8 | 46.3% | 84.1% |
| December | 646 | 4 | 68.5% | 88.0% |
The pattern is what you'd expect from a queue: when reports surge, each one waits longer. A report filed in February had a median wait of 20 days and roughly a one-in-four chance of closing within a week. A report filed in August or September had a median of 8 days. October and December were quickest, with a fraction of the volume.
May comes with a footnote. Its numbers are dragged down by one event: on August 28, 2025, the city closed 176 pothole tickets in a single day, and 167 of them had been filed in May 2024, about 15 months earlier. That looks like an administrative clean-up of old records rather than 167 holes being filled on one day. It's a good illustration of why ticket closure and road repair are not the same thing.
Most reports carry the city council district they fall in. Across the full period:
| Council district | Reports | Resolved | Median days | Closed within 7 days | Closed within 30 days | Share canceled |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| District 1 | 2,486 | 1,792 | 9 | 44.8% | 84.5% | 27.1% |
| District 2 | 2,999 | 2,392 | 7 | 54.0% | 88.8% | 19.7% |
| District 3 | 3,258 | 2,946 | 10 | 41.5% | 81.5% | 8.4% |
| District 4 | 5,482 | 4,784 | 9 | 43.4% | 78.5% | 11.6% |
| District 5 | 3,425 | 2,558 | 13 | 33.0% | 77.5% | 24.6% |
| District 6 | 4,914 | 3,420 | 11.5 | 36.1% | 76.8% | 29.7% |
Another 569 reports have no district recorded and are left out of the table.
Districts 5 and 6 have been the slowest over the whole period, and District 2 the fastest. The gap was widest in 2024, when the average resolved report took more than 50 days in both District 5 and District 6. By 2025 the districts' averages had converged to between about 17 and 24 days. But District 5 has had the lowest share closed within a week in every year, including 2026: 53.8% of its resolved 2026 reports closed within seven days, compared with about three-quarters in Districts 2, 3 and 4.
Two cautions. First, report counts reflect who reports as much as road conditions, so District 4's lead in volume is not proof that it has the worst streets. Second, cancellation rates vary widely, from 8.4% in District 3 to 29.7% in District 6, for reasons the data doesn't record. The analytics page has more district-level breakdowns.
Not much. About 60% of pothole reports came in through the myKCMO app on iPhone or Android, 20% by phone, and 18% through the web version of the app. Resolved app reports had a median of 9 days, web reports 9, and phone reports 11. A two-day difference isn't nothing, but it could reflect when and where people tend to call rather than the channel itself. It's also small next to the differences between seasons and years. Use whichever channel lets you give the most precise location; how to report a pothole in Kansas City covers what to include.
Most reports close within a few weeks. Some don't. The longest-running resolved ticket in the data was opened on March 30, 2024, and closed on November 15, 2025, after 595 days.
The open reports tell the same story from the other side. Of the 201 reports still open when we pulled the data, 117 had been open more than 30 days, 69 more than 90 days, 35 more than 180 days, and 23 more than a year. The oldest, on the 5700 block of Grand Avenue, was filed on June 29, 2024, which was 803 days before our pull. The Hall of Fame tracks the longest-waiting reports as they stand today.
About one pothole report in five ends up canceled rather than resolved. Cancellations tend to come quickly: 54.2% happened within a week of the report, with an average of 14.3 days.
2025 stands out. That year 2,941 pothole reports were canceled, 30.3% of the total, and they were concentrated in the late-winter surge. Of the 2,320 reports filed in March 2025, 1,079 were canceled. The city canceled 141 pothole tickets on February 28, 2025, 142 on March 10, and 175 on March 31. Batches like that suggest duplicate reports of the same holes being cleared out during a busy stretch, but the dataset doesn't record the reason for any cancellation.
A cancellation can also mean the road isn't the city's to fix. Interstates and state routes belong to MoDOT, not Kansas City; who maintains Kansas City's roads sorts out which agency is responsible for what.
Expect about a week, but not in February. At 2026's pace, 89% of resolved reports were closed within 14 days and 98.6% within 30. In the 2024 and 2025 winter surges, a wait of three weeks or more was normal. If you're reporting in February or March, be patient for the first couple of weeks.
Check back after two weeks, and follow up after thirty days. Look your report up on the map. If it's still open after a month, it's well outside the norm: only 1.4% of resolved 2026 reports took longer than that. Call 311 with your ticket number, or file a fresh report with a more precise location. As the canceled-report numbers show, a report that crews can't match to a specific hole is one that goes nowhere.
If it says resolved but the hole is still there, report it again. A resolved ticket isn't reopened. A patch that failed, or a closure that was only administrative, needs a new report to get back into the queue.
If it was canceled, find out why. Check whether the street is a state route, and whether another open report already covers the same hole. If neither applies, a new report with a photo and an exact address is reasonable.
If the pothole damaged your car, don't wait for the ticket. The written-notice deadline for a claim against the city runs from the day of the incident, not from when a ticket closes, and a report that sits open for weeks can eat into it. A report that was already open before your damage is useful evidence that the city had been told. The pothole claim guide walks through the notice requirement and the steps. Pothole damage to your car covers what to check on the vehicle itself.
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