Methodology

Source

Every figure on this site is transcribed from a Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD) filed publicly with a U.S. state regulator. Each figure is rendered with an inline citation: [page · state · filing date]. A figure without a verifiable page in the filing is not published. Page numbers are the PDF viewer's page index; a filing's own printed page numbers may differ by a fixed offset (cover pages and front matter).

What each section shows

• Item 5 — initial franchise fee.
• Item 6 — royalty and advertising-fund rows only; the full fee schedule is in the FDD.
• Item 7 — the FDD's stated total estimated initial investment for the base single-franchise offering (low–high). Multi-unit formats are not broken out.
• Item 20 — franchised outlet counts (start of year, end of year, net change, transfers, terminations, non-renewals, ceased operations) and company-owned outlets.
• Item 19 — financial performance representation, where the franchisor chooses to make one. The headline cohort is the disclosed cohort with the largest sample of franchised outlets measured on annual gross revenue or gross sales. Company-owned cohorts, ranked subsets (quartiles, top-N%), profit or expense measures, and non-annual metrics are never used as the headline. Non-annual and profit-type cohorts remain visible in the full cohort table, labeled as such. Figures are never annualized and never converted to profit.

Blanks

“Not disclosed” means the filing does not contain the figure (or the franchisor made no Item 19 representation — roughly a third of franchisors do not). A blank never means a value was estimated or filled in. Fields whose automated extraction confidence fell below threshold render blank by design.

Extraction and verification

Filings are parsed programmatically. Figures that require language-model assistance to locate are accepted only when the exact value is verified to appear on the cited page of the filing; unverifiable figures are dropped. Outlet-count arithmetic (start + net change = end) and low ≤ high consistency are checked; failing figures are withheld and noted under “Extraction notes” on the brand page.

Known limitations

• Period classification (annual vs. non-annual) relies on the wording of each cohort's description; a small number of non-annual figures may be mislabeled if the filing does not state the period near the figure.
• Item 7 totals reflect the base single-franchise offering only.
• Filings are snapshots. Franchisors update FDDs at least annually; the filing date on each page tells you which snapshot you are reading.
• This site aggregates and transcribes; it does not audit, endorse, or rank any franchise.