Yes, Keller Williams is a franchise. The 2026 FDD: $35,000 fee, $183,647 to $336,495 investment, 6% royalty capped per agent, 735 market centers, no Item 19.
Quick answer Yes. Keller Williams Realty, LLC franchises real estate brokerages it calls market centers, and 735 of the 751 open on December 31, 2025 were franchised. The 2026 FDD puts one market center at $183,647 to $336,495 with a $35,000 initial fee and a 6% royalty on gross commission income. There is no Item 19.
Item 20 of the 2026 FDD counts 735 franchised Keller Williams market centers open on December 31, 2025, alongside 16 company-affiliated ones. A market center is a real estate brokerage office. Keller Williams Realty, LLC sells the right to operate one under a five-year franchise agreement, and each location requires its own agreement. That makes the answer a plain yes.
The franchisor was organized in Texas on December 21, 1994, converted from a corporation to a limited liability company on February 28, 2025, and has sold market center franchises since November 22, 1995. It states in Item 1 that it holds no direct or indirect ownership interest in any market center.
Most people who type this question are asking something narrower: whether joining Keller Williams as an agent means buying a franchise. It does not. Agents affiliate with a market center as independent contractors. The franchise is the brokerage, and buying one costs six figures before a single listing is taken.
| Item 7 line | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| Initial franchise fee | $35,000 | $35,000 |
| Other initial fees (orientation, technology) | $1,447 | $2,245 |
| Broker license | $1,500 | $5,000 |
| Professional association or board fees | $500 | $2,000 |
| Local MLS memberships | $100 | $250 |
| Insurance | $5,000 | $15,000 |
| Initial lease and utility deposits | $3,700 | $10,000 |
| Leasehold improvements | $5,000 | $50,000 |
| Office furniture, equipment, phone and computer systems | $40,000 | $110,000 |
| Exterior signs | $5,000 | $10,000 |
| Office supplies | $3,900 | $7,000 |
| Professional fees | $5,000 | $10,000 |
| Advertising | $2,500 | $5,000 |
| Additional funds, 3 months | $75,000 | $75,000 |
| Total | $183,647 | $336,495 |
Two lines deserve a second look. The additional funds line does not flex: $75,000 covers three months at both ends of the range, even though the rest of the table swings by roughly $150,000. A market center carrying $110,000 of equipment and $50,000 of leasehold work does not burn cash at the same rate as one at the bottom of both lines, so treat the reserve as a floor rather than an estimate. The $35,000 initial fee also includes $6,000 allocated to a training and MAPS coaching subscription, and any part of that subscription unused within 18 months of signing is forfeited.
Item 1 puts the amount payable to the franchisor at $36,440 to $37,245. Everything else in the table goes to a landlord, a vendor, an insurer, or a state licensing authority. If you add a Business Center under the optional addendum, the incremental investment is $29,600 to $88,150, bringing the combined range to $213,247 to $424,645.
Worth noting for anyone shopping the category: Keller Williams publishes one Item 7 scenario, a new market center. Century 21 and Coldwell Banker each publish two, and their cheap end is a conversion of an existing independent brokerage. Century 21’s new start-up office runs $117,270 to $473,400 and Coldwell Banker’s runs $118,550 to $741,000. Compare start-up to start-up or the numbers stop meaning anything. Our brokerage franchise comparison lays out the rest of the field.
Item 6 sets a monthly Production Royalty of 6% of gross commission income, drafted from your bank account on the seventh business day. Then it caps the royalty at $3,000 per agent per year, with the franchisor reserving the right to raise that ceiling to $4,000.
Run the arithmetic and the model changes shape. At 6%, an agent hits the $3,000 cap after generating $50,000 of gross commission income for the year. Every dollar that agent produces above $50,000 carries no royalty at all. The headline 6% is really a per-agent fee with a percentage-shaped ramp, and the effective rate falls as your roster gets more productive.
Two fixed charges sit on top. A Core Market Center Fee of $1,185 per month covers system-wide marketing, management, and technology platforms, and an Associate Access Fee of $72 per month per agent covers agent-facing tools, tiered down to $36 for team members past the first 20. Both are frozen through 2027 and rise in 2028 to $1,250 and $75. There is no separate advertising fund percentage anywhere in Item 6, which is unusual for a franchise of this size and means the Core Market Center Fee is doing that work.
A 100-agent market center where every agent caps out would send Keller Williams roughly $300,000 in royalty, $86,400 in access fees, and $14,220 in core fees, so about $400,000 a year. That is a ceiling drawn from the disclosed caps, not a forecast. A roster of part-time producers pays far less royalty and exactly the same access fees, which is the entire risk of the model in one sentence.
Pull the full Keller Williams data sheet. VetMyFranchise reads Items 5, 7, and 19 out of the filed document rather than the recruiting deck.
Item 19 of the 2026 Keller Williams FDD runs about 220 words and contains no numbers. The sentence that matters: “We do not make any representations about a franchisee’s future financial performance or the past financial performance of company-affiliated or franchised outlets.”
The FTC Franchise Rule makes an Item 19 optional, so this is legal. What makes it worth flagging is that it is not a Keller Williams idiosyncrasy. We pulled the same item out of the 2026 filings for RE/MAX, Century 21, and Coldwell Banker. All three decline in nearly identical boilerplate. The largest residential brokerage franchisors in the country have collectively decided not to publish what a broker-owner earns.
There is a defensible reason. Market center revenue is a function of agent count and agent productivity, and both vary more across offices than restaurant sales vary across restaurants. A median would be close to meaningless. That reasoning does not shrink the buyer’s problem, it relocates it. Our guide to what a missing Item 19 means covers the general case.
Two other items carry the weight Item 19 will not.
Item 12 sets sales floors with teeth. Keller Williams may terminate the franchise agreement if, starting in month 6, you fail to average more than $20,000 in monthly gross commissions across any consecutive three-month period; starting in month 13, more than $45,000; and starting in month 25, more than $125,000. Those are not projections, they are the franchisor’s own minimum viability line, and $125,000 a month works out to $1.5 million of annual gross commission income by year three. The FDD’s Special Risks box flags both “Mandatory Minimum Payments” and “Sales Performance Required,” which is where state regulators put terms they want a buyer to notice. Item 12 also confirms you get no exclusive territory, only a promise that no other bricks-and-mortar market center will open inside your Awarded Area.
Item 20 shows direction. Franchised market centers went from 784 at the start of 2023 to 766, then 762, then 735 at the end of 2025. During 2025, 11 opened while 8 were terminated, 5 were not renewed, 5 were reacquired by the franchisor, and 20 ceased operations for other reasons. Table 5 lists zero franchise agreements signed but not yet opened and zero projected new market centers, franchised or company-affiliated, for the next fiscal year.
Read that against the same filing period at RE/MAX, whose US franchised office count went 3,477, then 3,358, then 3,149, then 2,994. Every RE/MAX office in the country is franchised, with zero company-owned offices for three straight years. Both networks are contracting. This is a consolidating category rather than a single struggling brand, and anyone weighing brokerage ownership against buying the buildings instead should price that trend in.
Item 3 is the other thing to read closely. Keller Williams is a defendant in the NAR buyer-commission antitrust litigation and disclosed a $70 million nationwide class settlement covering the Moehrl, Sitzer, and Umpa claims, plus a separate $20 million settlement in the Leeder case that received preliminary approval on February 13, 2026 with a final approval hearing set for July 28, 2026. The commission structure those cases attacked is the same gross commission income your 6% royalty is calculated on.
| 2026 FDD | Keller Williams | RE/MAX Integrated Regions |
|---|---|---|
| Initial franchise fee | $35,000 | $8,750 to $35,000 by market density |
| Item 7 total | $183,647 to $336,495 | $37,100 to $336,500 |
| Royalty | 6% of GCI, capped $3,000 per agent per year | 1% of revenue |
| Recurring fixed fees | $1,185 per month plus $72 per agent per month | $143 to $170 per agent per month |
| Annual dues per agent | none disclosed | $410 |
| Item 19 | none | none |
| US franchised outlets, 12/31/2025 | 735 market centers | 2,994 offices |
The fee architectures diverge more than the totals do. RE/MAX front-loads a per-agent monthly charge and takes only 1% of revenue on top. Keller Williams takes 6% of everything until each agent has produced $50,000, then takes nothing further from that agent. An office of high producers is cheaper to run under the Keller Williams structure than the 6% headline implies. An office of part-timers is expensive under both, and worse under RE/MAX, where the per-agent fee accrues regardless of production.
Item 15 tells you what the job is. Personal participation is not required, but you must retain three named people: an Operating Principal with day-to-day authority who must be or must secure a licensed broker, a Team Leader whose primary responsibility is the agent recruiting program and who may not sell real estate, and a Market Center Administrator. The Team Leader and the Administrator are both barred from other business activity. That is a payroll commitment before your first agent signs.
The initial term is five years. A successor 10-year agreement is available at the franchisor’s sole discretion, requires 210 days of advance notice, and conditions renewal on, among other things, having made profit-sharing contributions in at least 4 of every 5 consecutive months during the final 24 months of the term. Item 20 attaches the current franchisee list as Exhibit I along with a list of former franchisees. With no earnings disclosure in the document, those two lists are the only underwriting tool you have.
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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.
The 2026 FDD estimates $183,647 to $336,495 to open one market center. That includes a $35,000 initial franchise fee, $40,000 to $110,000 of office furniture, equipment, phone and computer systems, $5,000 to $50,000 of leasehold improvements, and a flat $75,000 of additional funds covering the first three months. Only $36,440 to $37,245 of the total is payable to Keller Williams. Adding a Business Center under the optional addendum costs another $29,600 to $88,150.
No. Item 19 of the 2026 FDD contains no figures. The operative sentence reads: "We do not make any representations about a franchisee's future financial performance or the past financial performance of company-affiliated or franchised outlets." That is legal under the FTC Franchise Rule, which makes an Item 19 optional. It is also the category standard. The 2026 filings for RE/MAX, Century 21, and Coldwell Banker all decline in nearly identical language.
It takes a share of the commissions its affiliated agents generate, which is why the recruiting job matters more than the listing job. Keller Williams charges the market center a 6% Production Royalty on gross commission income, capped at $3,000 per agent per year, plus a $1,185 monthly Core Market Center Fee and a $72 monthly Associate Access Fee per agent. Item 15 requires a Team Leader whose primary responsibility is the agent recruiting program and who is barred from selling real estate.
RE/MAX has the lower floor and the lower royalty. Its 2026 FDD prices an office at $37,100 to $336,500 with an initial fee of $8,750 to $35,000 depending on market density, a 1% Broker Fee on revenue, a $143 to $170 monthly fee per agent, and $410 in annual dues per agent. Keller Williams starts at $183,647 and charges 6% until each agent has produced $50,000 of GCI. Which is cheaper depends on the roster you can recruit, and neither document tells you that.
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