In the City of Chicago, it includes the communities of Bridgeport (home of mayor Richard M. Daley until he relocated in the late 1990s to the Near South Side's Central Station development), Clearing, Garfield Ridge, Mount Greenwood and West Lawn; almost all of Beverly; those portions of Archer Heights and West Elsdon west of Pulaski Road; the western portions of Ashburn, Chicago Lawn and Morgan Park; the portion of McKinley Park south of Archer Avenue; parts of Gage Park and New City; and a small section (1/16 mi2) of Armour Square.

The 3rd district takes in the municipalities of West Chicago, Wayne, Bensenville, Glendale Heights, Winfield; most of Wheaton; and parts of Warrenville, Bartlett (shared with Cook County), Hanover Park, Carol Stream, Glen Ellyn, Villa Park, Wood Dale, Addison, Lombard, Glendale Heights, Naperville, Batavia, and St. Charles.

[8] The district includes SeatGeek Stadium, home of the Chicago Red Stars team in Women's Professional Soccer, as well as Hawthorne Race Course; the area also benefits from Chicago White Sox home games at U.S. Cellular Field, which is less than 1,000 feet (300 m) beyond the district's border.

Portions of the Cook County Forest Preserves cover several square miles in the district's southwest corner.

[11][12] Industrial and business presences in the district include: Tootsie Roll Industries; Electro-Motive Diesel; a Nabisco bakery which is the largest biscuit bakery in the world;[13] the Chicago Area Consolidation Hub of United Parcel Service and adjacent BNSF Railway yard;[14] an ACH Food manufacturing plant (formerly part of Corn Products Company) in Summit;[15] an Owens Corning roofing and asphalt plant in Summit; and a Nalco Chemical plant in Bedford Park.

Among the federal facilities in the district is the Great Lakes Regional Headquarters of the National Archives and Records Administration[16] in West Lawn.

[23] Lipinski was decidedly the most conservative Democrat in the Illinois delegation,[18] opposing abortion and homosexual people serving in the military while supporting school prayer, tuition vouchers, the Defense of Marriage Act and the death penalty.

[28] His policies enabled him to work easily with Republicans; he was a candidate to become Transportation Secretary in the Bush administration, and collaborated with House Speaker Dennis Hastert of the 14th district to design the state's redistricting plan following the 2000 census.

[27] and after surviving with a 54%-46% win amid the Republican gains of 1994 he was reelected by increasing margins in each succeeding election; in 2002 he became the first unopposed candidate in the history of the district.

[29] In the 2018 Republican primary, the only option was Arthur Jones, a self-proclaimed member of the Nazi party and holocaust denier.

Although Jones received over 20,000 votes in the primary, many district GOP organizations took the unprecedented step of endorsing Rep. Dan Lipinski in the general election.

Lipinski was renominated in the primary election, but in August announced his intention to withdraw from the race, just two weeks before the deadline for replacing a candidate on the ballot.

Four days later, the district's ward and township committeemen – including Lipinski himself as well as Mayor Daley's brother John and Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan – met to choose a replacement; Lipinski nominated his son Dan, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, and he was approved without opposition despite not having lived in Illinois since 1989.

In his initial campaign, the younger Lipinski stated that his policies made him "not really that different from" his father, and indicated that he would oppose same-sex marriage as well as abortion except when the mother's life was at stake.