Best staffing franchises compared on gross billings vs. gross profit: Express, Spherion, PrideStaff, and AtWork Item 19 and Item 7 data from 2026 FDDs.
Quick answer PrideStaff's median franchised office billed $2,674,511 in 2025 and kept $404,930 of it. Staffing franchise revenue is gross billings, and gross margin across the category runs about 20% to 23%. Express Employment Professionals posts the largest disclosure at a $4,043,021 median across 526 offices.
PrideStaff’s 2026 FDD reports a median of $2,674,511 in gross billings across 53 franchised offices that had operated for at least two years. The same table reports the median gross margin on those billings: $611,549. Then it reports what the franchisee kept after PrideStaff took its 35% share of that margin: $404,930.
Three numbers, one office, an 85% drop from the first to the third. That arithmetic explains why a category with the highest per-unit revenue outside food service almost never makes a buyer’s shortlist, and why the buyers who do shortlist it are usually reading the third number instead of the first.
Staffing revenue is gross billings. A franchisee bills a client $32 an hour for a warehouse worker and pays that worker roughly $25. The $32 is revenue; the $7 is the business. Payroll passes straight through the P&L. Every staffing brand in our database discloses gross margin between 20% and 23%, so a $4M revenue headline describes an $830,000 business in a $4M costume. Anyone who ranks these brands by Item 19 revenue against a pizza franchise or a home services franchise is comparing two quantities that are not on the same scale, which is the same trap covered in how to verify Item 19 earnings claims.
| Brand (FDD entity) | Median gross billings | Median gross profit | Margin | Item 19 sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Express Employment Professionals (Express Services, Inc.) | $4,043,021 | $830,634 | ~21% | 526 offices open 24+ months |
| Spherion (Spherion Staffing, LLC) | $2,870,331 | $690,869 | 21.5% | 64 franchisees, 1+ year |
| PrideStaff (PrideStaff, Inc.) | $2,674,511 | $611,549 | 22.8% | 53 offices open 2+ years |
| AtWork (AtWork Franchise, Inc.) | $1,842,996 | $381,900 | 20.5% | 63 offices, full year 2025 |
Read the sample column before the revenue column. Express reports per office. PrideStaff reports per office. Spherion reports per franchise agreement and aggregates multi-office owners into one line, so 189 units collapse into 64 data points and the median describes an owner rather than a location. Spherion’s table also covers fiscal year 2024, a year behind the other three. Express’s margin is the one ratio here that the FDD does not print as a percentage; it is the median gross margin divided by the median sales, which is close enough to read but not a per-office figure.
Express Services, Inc. is the entity that files the FDD for Express Employment Professionals. Its 2026 document reports 758 franchised units and 7 company-owned, and its Item 19 covers 526 of them: every franchised unit open more than 24 months, with three years of history in a single table.
For fiscal 2025 those 526 offices produced median annual sales of $4,043,021 and average sales of $5,342,686. Median gross margin came in at $830,634. Median franchisee share of gross margin and gross receipts, which is the number closest to what actually reaches the owner’s operating account, was $563,915. Express also discloses what it collected: royalties averaged 38.0% of gross margin and 8.4% of sales.
That 40% share of gross margin is the Express model. Item 6 sets its cut at 40% of Core Occupations gross margin, remits the franchisee’s 60% on the 25th of each month, holds back 1% of gross margin in a reserve account against uncollectible client accounts, and charges an invoice back to the franchisee if it goes unpaid for 75 days. A franchisee’s cash flow becomes a monthly margin remittance rather than a receivables cycle they fund themselves. That structure is the reason Express’s Item 7 numbers look low next to Spherion’s.
Express files four separate Item 7 tables and they describe genuinely different businesses. A Core Occupations office runs $131,000 to $287,700, a Professional Occupations office $303,500 to $598,700, and a Healthcare Occupations office $313,150 to $503,100. A branch office added inside an existing territory starts at $39,450. Aggregators quoting Express as a $39,450 opportunity are quoting that branch table, which is not available to a first-time buyer.
The ramp is in the same Item 19. Express discloses 22 units in their first 12 months at a median of $892,374 in sales, and 9 units in their second 12 months at $1,840,907. Samples of 22 and 9 are too thin to rank on. Directionally they say what the working capital line says: year one lands near a fifth of the mature median.
Spherion’s tenure bands are the most useful table any staffing franchisor publishes. Franchisees at one to five years posted a median of $1,054,773 in sales and $293,004 in gross profit. At six to ten years, $3,275,051 and $692,068. At ten-plus years, $4,277,655 and $857,792. Nineteen of the 64 franchisees, or 29.7%, beat the system’s average gross profit percentage, which tells you the average is being pulled by a handful of very large owners. The top of the range is a $46,397,126 sales figure, and it belongs to somebody who has been at this for a decade.
PrideStaff discloses the layer almost nobody else does. Its Item 19 prints gross billings, gross margin, and franchisee share side by side, plus an average bill rate of $28.53, an hourly gross margin of $6.52, and an hourly franchisee share of $4.30 at the median office. Six-fifty an hour in margin, four-thirty of which is yours. Multiply that by the hours you can realistically staff in your territory and you have a revenue model that does not require you to trust anyone’s median.
Every staffing and recruiting franchise in our database is listed with Item 7, royalty, and Item 19 data on one screen.
AtWork’s staffing business runs $165,000 to $250,000 in Item 7, the lowest genuine entry point among the four for a standalone office. Its 63-office sample produced median gross revenue of $1,842,996, median gross profit of $381,900, and a 20.48% median gross margin. The tenure split follows the same curve as Spherion’s: seven offices at one to three years posted a $1,449,656 median, while 42 offices at five-plus years posted $2,497,286.
Then there is the note that the sample excludes 22 franchised offices that permanently closed during the 2025 calendar year, seven of which had been open fewer than 12 months. AtWork disclosed that itself, in Item 19, in plain language. I am not going to convert it into a rate, because a single year of one brand’s closures is not a failure rate. It does mean the $1.8M median describes the offices that were still open at year end, and you should ask a franchise development rep about those 22 by name.
Franchise fees in this category run $20,000 to $40,000. That is not the entry price. The entry price is the additional funds line.
| Brand | Franchise fee | Additional funds | Total Item 7 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Express (Core Occupations) | $20,000 to $40,000 | $75,000 to $175,000 (9 months) | $131,000 to $287,700 |
| Spherion | $30,000 | $125,000 to $234,000 (6 to 11 months) | $211,725 to $423,925 |
| PrideStaff | $40,000 | $90,000 to $110,000 (3 months) | $151,950 to $244,600 |
| AtWork (staffing) | $40,000 | $75,000 to $139,500 (6 to 9 months) | $165,000 to $250,000 |
The mechanism is simple and unforgiving. Temporary workers get paid weekly. Clients pay on 30 to 60 day terms. Every new account you win widens that gap before it closes it, so a fast-growing office burns more working capital than a flat one. PrideStaff’s three-month cushion is the thinnest in the table, and the brand’s own resale disclosure asks for a minimum of $100,000 in liquid funds on top of the purchase price, which reads like a correction to its own three-month estimate. Our guide to how much cash reserve a franchise really needs covers how to size this against your own ramp rather than the franchisor’s.
Express will refund up to $40,000 of the initial franchise fee to a new franchisee who bills 16 or more clients in a single week or generates $65,000 in gross margin within the first 26 weeks. Read that as the franchisor telling you what a successful first six months looks like: sixteen paying employers, found and closed, by someone whose job that week is prospecting.
Owners who came from outside sales, territory management, or B2B account work tend to survive that. Owners who bought a staffing franchise because they enjoy interviewing people tend to discover that recruiting is the part the system already solves and selling is the part it does not. The labor question runs both directions here, and the unit economics framework worth applying is gross margin per internal employee, not revenue per office.
Set staffing next to the categories in our best B2B service franchises roundup and the ranking inverts depending on which column you sort. Commercial cleaning, IT, and consulting brands post far smaller Item 19 revenue, and almost none of theirs is pass-through. A staffing office converts about a fifth of its billings into gross margin, and carries receivables, payroll funding, and employment liability to get there. The same gap between throughput and take-home shows up in food franchises versus service franchises, where cost of goods plays the role payroll plays here.
Sort these four by revenue and Express wins by 40%. Rank them on gross profit per dollar of Item 7 investment and the order shifts, then rank them on how much cash you need on hand in month seven and it shifts again.
Before you sign anything, put these fee structures against the wider system: our franchise fee benchmark report shows where each brand sits against 2,300+ FDDs on initial fee, royalty, and ad fund. Then pull the Item 19 tables and read the gross margin column first.
Get the full 12-section FDD analysis — $49
Real franchise data, real Item 19 numbers, personalized to your capital and location. Comparing 2–3 brands? The 3-pack is $99.
Browse franchises · pick your brand Or see a real sample report →
Get this comparison as a spreadsheet.
We'll email you the full comparison spreadsheet: every brand in this category with its Item 7 investment range and royalty, side by side. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
✓ Check your inbox
The comparison spreadsheet is on its way.
The only franchise report written entirely for the buyer. 12 sections covering financial risks, legal obligations, and a personalized recommendation.
Browse Franchise Library See a real sample report →
$49 per brand · $99 for a 3-brand pack
best staffing franchisesstaffing franchise costExpress Employment Professionalsrecruiting franchiseB2B franchiseItem 19gross billings
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.
A single staffing office runs about $131,000 to $423,925 in total initial investment across the four brands with current Item 19 data. Express Employment Professionals discloses $131,000 to $287,700 for a Core Occupations office, PrideStaff $151,950 to $244,600, AtWork $165,000 to $250,000, and Spherion $211,725 to $423,925. Franchise fees are a small slice: $20,000 to $40,000 at Express, $30,000 at Spherion, $40,000 at PrideStaff and AtWork.
Judge it on gross margin, never on billings. PrideStaff's median office billed $2,674,511 and produced $611,549 of gross margin, of which the franchisee kept $404,930 after the franchisor's 35% share. Rent, internal staff salaries, insurance, software, and the owner's own pay all come out of that $404,930. Express discloses a median franchisee share of $563,915 on median billings of $4,043,021.
None of the four brands require it, and the disclosures suggest business-to-business selling matters more. Express offers a refund of up to $40,000 of its initial fee to new franchisees who bill 16 or more clients in a single week or generate $65,000 in gross margin within their first 26 weeks. That incentive describes a sales ramp, not a recruiting one.
You pay temporary workers weekly and invoice clients on 30 to 60 day terms, so every new account widens the gap before it closes it. Growth consumes cash rather than generating it. Item 7 reflects this directly: Spherion budgets $125,000 to $234,000 of additional funds for six to eleven months, and PrideStaff budgets $90,000 to $110,000 for three.
Express Employment Professionals, at 758 franchised units plus 7 company-owned, per its 2026 FDD. Spherion reports 189 franchised units, AtWork 83, and PrideStaff 65 franchised plus 6 company-owned. Express also discloses the largest Item 19 sample in the category at 526 offices, which makes its median the most statistically useful figure on this page.
This page is part of VetMyFranchise. View all pages: llms.txt · llms-full.txt