No. FedEx Office is a corporate FedEx subsidiary with no FDD. The UPS Store is the franchised one: $39,950 fee, $222,368 to $606,081, 5,487 franchised centers.
Quick answer No. FedEx Office is a wholly owned FedEx subsidiary and every location is company operated, so there is no franchise program and no FDD to read. The comparable counter you can buy is The UPS Store, where 5,487 of 5,503 US centers were franchisee owned at the end of 2025.
FedEx Office and The UPS Store sell the same things to the same walk-in customer: printing, packing, boxes, mailbox rental, notary service. Behind the counter they are opposite businesses, one a corporate store staffed by employees of a Fortune 500 logistics company, the other a small business somebody bought with a $39,950 franchise fee and a bank loan.
Anyone searching “is fedex office a franchise” is usually standing on the wrong side of that line. The answer is no, and it has never been anything else.
FedEx Office is a wholly owned FedEx subsidiary. The stores are company operated, the people behind the counter are employees, and the results roll up into a public company’s segment reporting rather than into an owner’s tax return. That structure produces no document for a prospective buyer, because there is no prospective buyer.
The chain arrived there by acquisition. FedEx bought Kinko’s in 2004 for $2.4 billion and had retired the Kinko’s name in favor of FedEx Office by 2008. Kinko’s was not franchised either, so there was never a system to inherit, convert, or unwind. A print and ship chain that has been corporate for its entire life under two different names is about as settled an answer as this category offers.
What follows from that is a research problem. A franchised brand leaves a paper trail: a disclosure document filed annually, registered in the states that require it, carrying unit counts, fee schedules, litigation history, and sometimes earnings data. A corporate chain leaves none of it. Nobody publishes a table showing how many FedEx Office locations opened or closed last year, and nobody has to.
The larger source of confusion is not the print shop. It is the delivery side, where FedEx Ground service areas are run by Independent Service Providers, contractors who cover defined territories with their own trucks and their own drivers. Those routes change hands regularly. They get listed on business-for-sale marketplaces next to restaurants and car washes, with asking prices and revenue figures attached, which reads exactly like a franchise resale listing.
It is not one, and the reason is mechanical. The FTC Franchise Rule treats a relationship as a franchise only when three things are true together: the operator gets a trademark license, the brand exerts significant control over or gives significant assistance to the operation, and the operator makes a required payment of at least $500 to the brand within the first six months. Delivery contracting fails the third condition, because the payment runs the other direction. FedEx pays the contractor.
Everything a franchise buyer takes for granted disappears with the rule. There is no disclosure document arriving 14 days before signing. There is no Item 7 estimating what you will spend before the business supports itself, no Item 19 reporting what other operators collect, no Item 20 showing how many contractors exited last year, no audited financials for the counterparty, and no state registration file to pull. The absence is not a scandal. It is simply what a commercial services contract looks like.
Diligence has to be rebuilt from the seller’s own records: tax returns, the settlement detail FedEx pays against, payroll for the drivers you would take on, and the maintenance history and remaining life of every vehicle in the deal. A route business can be a sound purchase. It gets underwritten the way you would underwrite buying a plumbing company, and a buyer who came in expecting a standardized packet should reset before making an offer. Even inside a real franchise, plenty of real money sits outside the document, which is why we keep a running list of the costs that never appear in an FDD. With a contractor agreement, every one of those gaps is wider.
The parallel brand did the opposite thing with its retail network. Item 20 of the 2026 Traditional FDD, issued April 23, 2026, counts 5,487 franchised centers against 16 company-owned as of December 31, 2025, which puts 99.7% of the US system in franchisee hands.
| FedEx Office | The UPS Store | |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns the locations | FedEx, all of them | Franchisees, 5,487 of 5,503 |
| Available to buy | No | Yes |
| Initial franchise fee | None offered | $39,950 |
| Item 7 initial investment | No FDD exists | $222,368 to $606,081 |
| Ongoing fees | Not applicable | 5% royalty, 1% marketing, 2.5% national advertising |
| Item 19 earnings data | None | 5,058 centers, $724,293 average adjusted gross sales |
The fee row deserves a slow read. Item 6 stacks a 5% royalty, a 1% marketing fee, and a 2.5% national advertising fee on the same sales base, so 8.5% of revenue is committed before rent, payroll, or cost of goods. The advertising piece carries an annual cap, currently $27,734, so it stops climbing somewhere past $1.1 million in sales while every center below that line pays the full rate.
The earnings row is large and narrow at once. Item 19 covers 5,058 franchised traditional centers, which is among the biggest samples any franchisor files, and it reports adjusted gross sales rather than profit. The document names eleven expense categories the figure leaves out, among them labor, shipping costs, cost of goods sold, rent, and the royalties above. Only 2,263 centers, 45% of them, cleared the $724,293 average, which puts the median below the mean. The three-year trend is flat: $721,245 in 2023 against $724,293 in 2025 is 0.4% of nominal movement, a decline once inflation is applied.
Our full walkthrough of what The UPS Store’s 2026 FDD discloses covers the rest, including the remodel obligation at renewal and the territory language.
Every figure above comes out of Items 6, 7, 19, and 20 of the filed document rather than a franchise portal listing, which is how the UPS Store dossier is built.
It settles which brand you can research, not which one is worth owning. Being franchised is a disclosure fact rather than a quality rating, and the same 2026 document that makes The UPS Store comparable also exposes its weak spots: flat system sales, a territory Item 12 states plainly is non-exclusive, and a mandatory Laser Lite remodel at every renewal priced at $97,047 to $281,271. Those weaknesses are visible, and visibility is the entire advantage. FedEx Office offers no equivalent because it offers nothing at all, while a FedEx Ground route offers a real business with no standardized way to line it up against the next one.
If the appeal was the shipping counter rather than the name on the sign, the category runs wider than these two brands. Independent pack and ship and print franchisors file on the same annual schedule, and a smaller system that publishes a franchisee-only earnings figure can be easier to underwrite than a large one reporting gross sales alone. Our ranking of B2B service franchises is where that comparison starts.
The one-word answer is no. The useful version of the question is which print and ship brands file a disclosure document at all, and what Items 7 and 19 say once you read them next to each other. Start with The UPS Store’s actual numbers.
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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.
No. FedEx Office is a wholly owned subsidiary of FedEx and every location is company operated, so there is nothing offered for sale and no franchise disclosure document to review. The brand has no franchise sales organization, no Item 7 investment estimate, and no state registration file. Buyers looking for a print and ship storefront in this format are usually looking at The UPS Store, which had 5,487 franchised centers at the end of 2025.
No. FedEx Ground delivery areas are run by Independent Service Providers, which are contractors operating under a negotiated service agreement rather than franchisees. The FTC Franchise Rule requires a payment of at least $500 to the franchisor within the first six months, and in this relationship FedEx pays the contractor instead. Routes are bought and sold, but the transaction is an ordinary small business purchase with no FDD, no Item 19, and no 14-day waiting period attached.
No. Kinko's grew as a corporate chain rather than a franchise system, and FedEx acquired it in 2004 for $2.4 billion. The Kinko's name was retired in favor of FedEx Office by 2008. Because there was no franchise system in place before the acquisition, there was never one for FedEx to convert or close down.
Yes, and almost entirely so. Item 20 of the 2026 Traditional FDD counts 5,487 franchised centers against 16 company-owned as of December 31, 2025. Item 7 prices a new or relocation traditional center at $222,368 to $606,081 including a $39,950 initial franchise fee, and Item 6 sets a 5% royalty plus a 1% marketing fee plus a 2.5% national advertising fee.
The FDD does not disclose it. Item 19 reports adjusted gross sales across 5,058 franchised traditional centers, with a 2025 average of $724,293, and it names eleven expense categories the figure excludes, among them labor, shipping costs, cost of goods sold, rent, and royalties. Only 45% of centers cleared that average, so the median sits below it. None of those numbers is profit.
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