Yes, Burger King is a franchise: 5,518 of 6,650 US restaurants are franchisee-owned. The 2026 FDD fee, royalty, investment range, and the Carrols effect.
Quick answer Yes. Burger King is a franchise, and 5,518 of the 6,650 US restaurants open at the end of 2025 were franchisee-owned, about 83%. The 2026 FDD sets a $50,000 fee on a 20-year term, a 4.5% royalty, an advertising contribution up to 4.5%, and a traditional build at $2,249,200 to $3,320,600.
The two brands sit on the same corners and sell the same product category, and they hand a buyer two different businesses. McDonald’s Corporation owns or master-leases most of the land its operators work from and charges rent on top of the royalty. Its 2026 disclosure document puts percentage rent for new and relocated traditional restaurants opening on or after January 14, 2026 generally between 6% and 23% of gross sales, with the minimum generally reaching 11.50% from the eighth year of the term.
Burger King Company LLC does not build the relationship that way. Its 2026 FDD charges a 4.5% royalty and an advertising contribution that cannot exceed 4.5% of monthly gross sales. Item 6 does carry a rent line, but it applies only where you lease the premises from the franchisor, rather than describing the standard deal. Site control, and the risk attached to it, is mostly yours. The longer explanation of the McDonald’s structure covers why that company chose to be a landlord.
The ownership split follows from the model, and the gap is wider than most people expect.
| US system, end of 2025 | Burger King | McDonald’s |
|---|---|---|
| Franchised restaurants | 5,518 | 13,062 |
| Company-owned restaurants | 1,132 | 644 |
| Total | 6,650 | 13,706 |
| Share franchised | about 83% | about 95% |
Both figures come from Item 20 of each brand’s 2026 disclosure document. Burger King is a franchise by any reading, and it is also, right now, the operator of more than a thousand of its own restaurants.
Three years of Item 20 data tell the story without commentary.
| Year | Franchised at year end | Company-owned at year end | Net change, franchised |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 6,640 | 138 | -352 |
| 2024 | 5,524 | 1,177 | -1,116 |
| 2025 | 5,518 | 1,132 | -6 |
The 2024 row is one transaction. A footnote on the same table states that on May 16, 2024, RBI acquired Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc., and 1,023 franchised restaurants owned by Carrols and its affiliates became company-owned. The franchised count did not collapse because operators failed. It fell because the franchisor bought its largest franchisee.
That matters to a prospective buyer for a practical reason. The company-owned restaurants are inventory. Item 5 of the same document describes a Carrols Refranchise Program under which the franchisor or its affiliate may offer you the assets of one or more restaurants at a price set at the time of the offer, against a term sheet and a deposit equal to 5% of the purchase price. A parallel Crown Your Career track takes a $7,500 deposit and runs a candidate through an employee phase before any offer. The refranchising is the strategy, and the FDD documents the mechanism rather than leaving it to a press release.
| Term | 2026 FDD figure |
|---|---|
| Initial franchise fee | $50,000 for a 20-year term |
| Franchise fee, shorter term | typically $25,000 for a 10-year term, prorated to a $15,000 minimum |
| Application fee | $250 per individual applicant, $5,000 for entity ownership |
| Royalty | 4.5% of monthly gross sales |
| Advertising | not to exceed 4.5% of monthly gross sales |
| Local investment spending | up to 2.0% of gross sales, set collectively by the market |
| Training fee | $7,500 per trainee |
| Digital services fee | $110 per restaurant monthly plus 1% of digital sales, capped at $4,500 a year |
| Traditional freestanding investment | $2,249,200 to $3,320,600 |
The recurring load lands near 11% of gross sales once the advertising cap and the local spending obligation are both live, before rent, food, labor, or debt service. Compare that to the Wendy’s structure, where the committed figure is 8%, and the difference shows up in every year of a 20-year term.
Format choice moves the capital requirement more than anything else in the document. Item 7 prices a co-brand site at $896,200 to $1,682,800, an in-line or end-cap at $944,800 to $1,942,800, a mall food court at $655,720 to $1,131,700, a big-box retail unit at $564,600 to $979,100, and an indoor modular unit at $348,400 to $789,100. A double drive-thru is required for every facility type except food courts, in-lines, indoor modular units, and big-box retail. The optional two-story indoor playground adds $150,000 to $245,000.
Pull the full Burger King data sheet if you want Items 5, 7, and 19 side by side rather than a recruitment summary.
Item 19 of the 2026 document reports gross sales for 5,747 traditional restaurants that operated the entire 2025 calendar year. Of those, 4,730 were franchisee-owned and 1,017 were company-owned, and the document reports each group separately.
| 2025 traditional restaurants | Median sales | Average sales |
|---|---|---|
| Franchisee-owned (4,730) | $1,593,606 | $1,692,549 |
| Company-owned (1,017) | $1,685,154 | $1,779,702 |
| Consolidated (5,747) | $1,610,633 | $1,707,974 |
Read the label before you use any of those numbers. The franchisee median is the lowest of the three, and it is the only one describing the business you would be buying. The spread inside the franchisee group is far wider than the gap between the columns: the high annual figure is $5,532,973 and the low is $188,523. Non-traditional restaurants report a franchisee-owned median of $1,197,033 across 630 units, which is the honest comparison if you are looking at a food court or a fuel co-brand rather than a freestanding building.
Our Item 19 deep dive works through an earlier vintage of this same disclosure line by line, and the pros and cons breakdown weighs what those sales support against what the buildout costs.
Item 20 carries two disclosures that a recruitment conversation will not raise. The first is capacity: zero franchise agreements were signed but not yet opened at the end of 2025, and the projection for the following year is 39 new franchised outlets across a 5,518-unit system. New construction is not the main path in. The second is a caution about the reference calls you are about to make. The document states that during the last three fiscal years, some current and former franchisees signed provisions restricting their ability to speak openly about their experience with the predecessor franchisor. Exhibit O3 lists 331 franchises whose outlets were terminated, cancelled, not renewed, or otherwise ceased operating, or who had not communicated with the franchisor in ten weeks. Call from that list anyway, and note who cannot answer.
The remodel obligation deserves its own line in your model. Item 19 reports sales uplift for 1,031 traditional restaurants remodeled to the modern image between 2018 and 2024, each carrying an estimated capital expenditure of $650,000 or more. Median uplift was 10.7%, and the 67 restaurants that were demolished and rebuilt showed a 21.0% median. A 10.7% lift on a $1.6 million restaurant is roughly $171,000 of additional annual sales against a $650,000 capital call, which is a real return and a slow one. Item 5 offers a Reclaim the Flame 2 Remodel Program that discounts the successor franchise fee to $2,500 per additional term year for operators who commit to that work.
Ask for the disclosure document, read Item 5 for which incentive program you actually qualify for, Item 7 for your specific format including the footnotes, Item 19 for the franchisee column rather than the consolidated one, and Item 20 for how many operators left last year. Then price the remodel clock on whatever restaurant you are being offered. Every figure above comes from the filed 2026 FDD, which is where we read Burger King rather than from a brand page.
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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.
Yes. The 2026 Burger King disclosure document reports 5,518 franchisee-owned restaurants and 1,132 company-owned restaurants open in the United States as of December 31, 2025. About 83% of the US system is run by independent operators who pay a royalty and an advertising contribution to Burger King Company LLC. The franchisor also operates restaurants directly, which is a change from how the system looked three years ago.
The 2026 FDD estimates $2,249,200 to $3,320,600 for a traditional freestanding restaurant, including a $50,000 franchise fee for a 20-year term. Non-traditional formats cost less: a mall food court unit is estimated at $655,720 to $1,131,700 and an indoor modular unit at $348,400 to $789,100. A 10-year term typically carries a $25,000 fee instead of $50,000.
Restaurant Brands International acquired Carrols Restaurant Group on May 16, 2024, and 1,023 restaurants that had been franchised became company-owned overnight. Item 20 shows the effect plainly: company-owned units went from 138 at the start of 2024 to 1,177 at the end of it, while franchised units fell from 6,640 to 5,524. Item 5 then describes a Carrols Refranchise Program for selling those restaurants back to operators.
A 4.5% royalty on monthly gross sales and an advertising contribution that the FDD caps at 4.5% of monthly gross sales. On top of that sit local investment spending of up to 2.0% of gross sales set collectively by franchisees in your market, a digital services fee of $110 per restaurant per month plus 1% of digital sales, and a $600 annual training platform charge. Rent applies only where you lease the premises from the franchisor.
Through existing restaurants rather than new construction. Item 20 reports zero franchise agreements signed but not yet opened at the end of 2025, and projects 39 new franchised outlets for the following year against a system of 5,518. Item 5 describes the Carrols Refranchise Program, where the franchisor or its affiliate sells you the assets of one or more restaurants at a negotiated price, and a Crown Your Career track that runs candidates through an employee phase first.
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