diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.1.0.rst b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.1.0.rst
index 4e7bd5a2032a7..31010c98712ad 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.1.0.rst
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.1.0.rst
@@ -337,6 +337,7 @@ I/O
 - Bug in :meth:`read_csv` was raising `TypeError` when `sep=None` was used in combination with `comment` keyword (:issue:`31396`)
 - Bug in :class:`HDFStore` that caused it to set to ``int64`` the dtype of a ``datetime64`` column when reading a DataFrame in Python 3 from fixed format written in Python 2 (:issue:`31750`)
 - Bug in :meth:`read_excel` where a UTF-8 string with a high surrogate would cause a segmentation violation (:issue:`23809`)
+- Bug in :meth:`read_csv` was causing a file descriptor leak on an empty file (:issue:`31488`)
 
 
 Plotting
diff --git a/pandas/io/parsers.py b/pandas/io/parsers.py
index 50b5db0274aa5..52783b3a9e134 100755
--- a/pandas/io/parsers.py
+++ b/pandas/io/parsers.py
@@ -2273,11 +2273,15 @@ def __init__(self, f, **kwds):
         # Get columns in two steps: infer from data, then
         # infer column indices from self.usecols if it is specified.
         self._col_indices = None
-        (
-            self.columns,
-            self.num_original_columns,
-            self.unnamed_cols,
-        ) = self._infer_columns()
+        try:
+            (
+                self.columns,
+                self.num_original_columns,
+                self.unnamed_cols,
+            ) = self._infer_columns()
+        except (TypeError, ValueError):
+            self.close()
+            raise
 
         # Now self.columns has the set of columns that we will process.
         # The original set is stored in self.original_columns.
diff --git a/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py b/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py
index b3aa1aa14a509..33460262a4430 100644
--- a/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py
+++ b/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py
@@ -15,6 +15,7 @@
 
 from pandas._libs.tslib import Timestamp
 from pandas.errors import DtypeWarning, EmptyDataError, ParserError
+import pandas.util._test_decorators as td
 
 from pandas import DataFrame, Index, MultiIndex, Series, compat, concat
 import pandas._testing as tm
@@ -2079,3 +2080,16 @@ def test_integer_precision(all_parsers):
     result = parser.read_csv(StringIO(s), header=None)[4]
     expected = Series([4321583677327450765, 4321113141090630389], name=4)
     tm.assert_series_equal(result, expected)
+
+
+def test_file_descriptor_leak(all_parsers):
+    # GH 31488
+
+    parser = all_parsers
+    with tm.ensure_clean() as path:
+
+        def test():
+            with pytest.raises(EmptyDataError, match="No columns to parse from file"):
+                parser.read_csv(path)
+
+        td.check_file_leaks(test)()