Best sports bar franchises compared on 2026 FDD data: Buffalo Wild Wings, Walk-On's, Wings Etc, and Anchor Bar on cost, fees, and Item 19 revenue.
Quick answer Four sports bar franchises disclose enough 2026 FDD data to judge properly. Wings Etc opens from $373,650, Anchor Bar from $1,202,000, Walk-On's from $1,688,800, and Buffalo Wild Wings from $2,463,945. Walk-On's posts the highest median revenue at $4,403,505 across 66 units; Buffalo Wild Wings discloses the deepest, 532 franchised units broken into quartiles.
Buffalo Wild Wings put a number in its 2026 FDD that most franchisors would rather leave out. The 532 franchised sports bars in its Item 19 have been open an average of 15.1 years. That single line reframes the $3,433,937 median annual unit volume sitting above it, because what you are reading is what a mature location grosses after fifteen years of local goodwill, not what your new build does in year two.
Sports bar and grill franchising is a narrow field with an absurdly wide price band. Four brands filed 2026 disclosure documents detailed enough to compare properly: Buffalo Wild Wings, Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux, Wings Etc. Grill & Pub, and Anchor Bar. Their entry costs span a factor of 17. Their earnings disclosures describe four different populations of restaurants, and that difference matters more than the headline medians do.
| Brand | Total investment (Item 7) | Initial fee | Royalty | Ad fund | Franchised units | 2025 revenue disclosed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buffalo Wild Wings | $2,463,945–$4,900,320 | $25,000 | 5% | 4% (2% non-traditional) | 549 | $3,433,937 median AUV, 532 units |
| Walk-On’s | $1,688,800–$6,577,500 | $60,000 | 5% | 2% currently | 73 | $4,403,505 median, 66 units |
| Anchor Bar | $1,202,000–$3,024,000 | $60,000 | 5% | up to 3% | 16 | $2,287,640 median, 9 units |
| Wings Etc | $373,650–$2,890,100 | $39,500 | 5% | 1.0%–2.0% | 56 | quartile averages $1,001,685–$2,193,596, 53 units |
Every one of those investment ranges blends two or three separate Item 7 tables, which is how a category ends up looking cheaper or dearer than it is. Read the format breakdowns in each profile below before you anchor on a number. And read the Item 19 column as four different questions, not one: only Buffalo Wild Wings and Wings Etc report by quartile, only Walk-On’s tells you its sample excludes an entire building format, and Anchor Bar’s nine restaurants are too few to rank against anything.
The 2026 FDD splits Item 7 into two columns. A new free-standing or non-traditional build runs $2,463,945 to $4,500,320. A non-free-standing location or a conversion of an existing free-standing sports bar runs $2,896,445 to $4,900,320. The $25,000 initial fee is the smallest in the category by a wide margin, which tells you where the franchisor makes its money: 5% royalty plus a 4% advertising contribution is 9% off the top of every dollar, the heaviest recurring load of the four.
Item 19 is the deepest disclosure in the category and worth reading in full. Across 532 franchised sports bars, annual unit volumes ran from $1,352,618 to $8,127,592, with a $3,433,937 median and a $3,574,130 average. Broken into quartiles of 133 units each, the top quartile’s median was $4,875,869 and the bottom quartile’s was $2,371,905. Four franchised locations that closed during 2025, all open at least twelve months, are excluded from the tables entirely.
Two other things belong in your model. Company-owned units outnumber franchised ones, 629 to 549, which is a different relationship with a franchisor than most systems offer. And in the most recent disclosure year the system opened 11 franchised sports bars and closed 15. We took the earnings tables apart line by line in our Buffalo Wild Wings Item 19 deep dive, and the buy-or-pass argument is in should I buy a Buffalo Wild Wings franchise.
Walk-On’s discloses two footprints, and the gap between them is the whole story. A standard-footprint restaurant of 5,000 to 7,000 square feet with 180 to 290 seats costs $2,051,300 to $6,577,500. A smaller footprint of 2,500 to 4,000 square feet with 90 to 150 seats costs $1,688,800 to $3,150,000. You develop the standard footprint unless the franchisor approves otherwise, so the cheaper number is a concession, not a menu option.
Now the disclosure. Of 73 franchised restaurants open at the end of 2025, seven opened during the year and were dropped from the table. The remaining 66 averaged $4,420,387 in gross revenues with a median of $4,403,505, a low of $2,287,802, and a high of $6,699,043. Exactly half of them hit or beat the average. That is the strongest median in the category, and it comes with one sentence in the FDD that decides whether it applies to you: all restaurants included in Item 19 are standard footprint restaurants. If you enter at $1,688,800 on the smaller build, the franchisor has published no earnings data for the format you are buying.
Fees are $60,000 up front, a 5% royalty debited weekly, and a system advertising contribution set at 2% of gross revenues, which the 2026 FDD states will not change during the term of the franchise agreement. Walk-On’s also publishes hourly wages as a percentage of gross revenues, which is more operating detail than most restaurant franchisors give up. The full profile is on the Walk-On’s franchise page.
Wings Etc discloses three formats in Item 7. A non-free-standing location or a conversion runs $373,650 to $1,548,600. A ground-up free-standing restaurant runs $1,623,650 to $2,890,100. The separate Wings Etc 2Go format runs $464,750 to $852,400. The initial fee is $39,500 for a Grill and Pub and $20,000 for a 2Go, and the advertising contribution of 1.0% to 2.0% is the lightest here by two full points.
The Item 19 is unusual. Rather than a system median, Wings Etc reports 53 franchised restaurants in four tiers with cost percentages attached to each. The top quartile of 14 restaurants averaged $2,193,596 in sales; the bottom 13 averaged $1,001,685. Across all four tiers, individual restaurant sales ran from $837,359 to $3,728,949. Food cost sat between 22.8% and 23.7% of sales, hourly labor between 15.4% and 17.1%, alcohol between 5.0% and 5.9%, and the disclosed cost lines summed to 49.5% at the top tier and 52.3% at the bottom.
Those are the numbers a buyer actually needs, and almost nobody publishes them. Note what they exclude: rent, royalty, advertising, utilities, insurance, salaried management, and debt service are all outside that 50%. The catch with Wings Etc is scale. It is a 56-unit Midwest system with 26 company-owned restaurants, an 11-year agreement term, and a $45,000 liquid capital requirement, which means you carry more of the marketing burden yourself. If a lower-cost wing concept is what you are really after, compare it against the counter-service brands in our best chicken franchises breakdown before committing to a full bar.
Anchor Bar is the Buffalo restaurant that claims the 1964 invention of the chicken wing, a claim local historians have been picking apart for years. As a franchise it is small: 16 franchised units, and an Item 19 built on nine restaurants of 4,000 to 9,000 square feet.
For 2025 those nine averaged $2,449,992 in gross sales with a median of $2,287,640, a high of $3,870,935, and a low of $988,703. The four-year series is the useful part, because Anchor Bar publishes it: medians of $2,438,062 in 2022, $2,305,859 in 2023, $2,192,582 in 2024, and $2,287,640 in 2025. Flat, with a wide spread underneath. The FDD also states that three franchised restaurants closed in 2025, one in September and two in October, all attributed to lower sales, and none of them appear in the chart. On a base of nine, three closures is not a footnote.
Item 7 comes in two tables. Converting an existing restaurant costs $1,202,000 to $1,854,000. A non-restaurant conversion, meaning a ground-up or shell build, costs $1,722,000 to $3,024,000. The fee is $60,000, the royalty 5% of gross revenues, and the advertising contribution runs up to 3%. Treat the Anchor Bar profile as a brand to investigate directly rather than a set of numbers to project from, and put validation calls to all nine operators at the top of your list.
Three line items separate a sports bar from every other restaurant format, and all three are visible in these FDDs.
Audio and video is the first. Buffalo Wild Wings budgets $275,000 to $425,000 for audio/visual equipment alone, plus $12,500 to $26,500 for sports memorabilia. Walk-On’s combines computer, television audio, and point of sale at $250,000 to $350,000 for a standard footprint and $100,000 to $200,000 for the smaller one. A wall of screens with the licensing and distribution behind it is a quarter-million-dollar capital line before you have poured a drink, and it depreciates on a schedule that does not care whether your sales met plan.
Liquor licensing is the second, and it is the most volatile number in the category. Walk-On’s discloses $300 to $25,000 for a state or local liquor license. Wings Etc discloses $500 to $95,000 for the same line. Neither is wrong. In license-quota states, an existing license trades on a secondary market at whatever the market says, which is why the same expenditure row spans two orders of magnitude. Price yours in your specific county before you sign anything, because no franchisor range will predict it.
Buildout is the third. Wings Etc puts construction on a free-standing restaurant at $1,310,000 to $2,200,000; Buffalo Wild Wings puts it at $1,430,000 to $2,100,000 for a new free-standing sports bar. A commercial kitchen, a full bar, and 4,000 to 10,000 square feet of seating do not come cheap in any market, and conversions of an existing restaurant are the only reliable way any of these brands gets meaningfully below seven figures.
If you have the capital and want a brand customers already drive to, Buffalo Wild Wings is the only national option here, and its disclosure is honest enough to show you the bottom quartile. Just price your pro forma against a first-year unit, not against a fifteen-year-old one.
If you are chasing revenue per location and can fund a standard-footprint build, Walk-On’s has the numbers, with the caveat that its Item 19 covers only the expensive format. If you want the lowest realistic entry into a full bar, Wings Etc gets you in under $400,000 on a conversion and is the only brand of the four that will show you what your food, labor, and alcohol costs are likely to look like. Anchor Bar is a regional bet on a famous name, and nine disclosed units means your diligence has to come from franchisee calls rather than from tables.
The wider field runs deeper than these four. We have ten brands with parsed FDDs in our sports bar franchise comparison, and you can put any two of them side by side in the comparison tool or browse the whole category in food and beverage franchises. Whichever you shortlist, the question to bring to the franchisor is the same one their own Item 19 raises: which units are in this table, and which ones are not.
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About this analysis The franchise data in this article is drawn from VetMyFranchise's structured analysis of 2,300+ Franchise Disclosure Documents filed with U.S. state regulators. See our data & methodology.
Between $373,650 and $6,577,500 across the four brands with 2026 FDDs on file. Wings Etc discloses $373,650 to $1,548,600 for a non-free-standing location or a conversion, Anchor Bar $1,202,000 to $1,854,000 to convert an existing restaurant, Walk-On's $1,688,800 to $3,150,000 for its smaller footprint, and Buffalo Wild Wings $2,463,945 to $4,900,320. Ground-up construction sits at the top of every one of those ranges.
Yes, and it is unusual in that the franchisor operates more locations than its franchisees do. The 2026 FDD reports 549 franchised sports bars against 629 company-owned. A franchise costs $2,463,945 to $4,900,320 to open with a $25,000 initial fee, a 5% royalty on gross sales, and a 4% advertising contribution that drops to 2% for non-traditional locations.
Wings Etc, at $373,650. That floor buys a non-free-standing Grill and Pub or a conversion of an existing free-standing restaurant, not the ground-up build, which runs $1,623,650 to $2,890,100. Its separate Wings Etc 2Go format costs $464,750 to $852,400 and carries a $20,000 initial fee instead of $39,500. The trade-off is a 56-unit system whose Item 19 quartile averages top out at $2,193,596.
Median annual revenue ran from roughly $1.4 million to $4.4 million in the 2026 filings. Walk-On's disclosed a $4,403,505 median across 66 franchised restaurants, Buffalo Wild Wings $3,433,937 across 532, and Anchor Bar $2,287,640 across nine. Wings Etc reports by quartile rather than system-wide, with tier averages from $1,001,685 to $2,193,596. Gross revenue is not profit, and full-service bar margins are thin.
All four charge 5% of gross sales or gross revenues. The advertising contribution is the real variable: Wings Etc takes 1.0% to 2.0%, Walk-On's 2%, Anchor Bar up to 3%, and Buffalo Wild Wings 4% for a traditional sports bar. Over a decade, that two-point gap between Wings Etc and Buffalo Wild Wings is real money on a $2 million unit.
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