Is PODS a franchise? Partly. PODS runs corporate and franchised markets across 150+ locations. Here is what UNITS and Go Mini's disclose that PODS does not.
Quick answer Partly. PODS operates both company-run and franchised markets across more than 150 locations in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK, with the largest metros run corporate. Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan has owned the brand since February 2015. We hold no PODS disclosure document, so no PODS investment figure here is verified.
Order a PODS container in a large metropolitan market and the truck that delivers it belongs to the company. Order the same container in a smaller territory and it may belong to a franchisee operating that market under a PODS agreement. Identical branding, identical reservation number, two different businesses behind the transaction.
That split is the honest answer. PODS is neither a pure franchise like The UPS Store nor a pure corporate chain. It runs both models at once across more than 150 locations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, with the biggest markets on the corporate side.
Ownership explains most of that posture. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has held PODS since February 2015, when it bought the company from an ownership group led by Arcapita in a deal valued at more than $1 billion. A pension fund buying a container network is buying recurring rental cash flow on a depreciating asset base, and that thesis favors owning the highest-density markets outright rather than collecting a royalty on them.
Our database holds no PODS Franchise Disclosure Document, and we could not verify whether PODS is granting new franchise territories in the United States today. We are not going to estimate around the gap.
With no filing there is no Item 5 initial fee, no Item 7 investment table split into containers and trucks and working capital, and nothing in Items 19 or 20 about what an existing franchisee collects or how many markets closed last year. Every PODS cost figure circulating on franchise directory sites is a secondhand number with no document behind it.
If you want to be in container storage, the useful move is to stop researching PODS and read the two filings that do exist.
UNITS Moving and Portable Storage and Go Mini’s are the brands in this category with current documents in our database. They land about $22,000 apart at the top of the range and $241,000 apart at the bottom, and they structure the deal very differently underneath.
| UNITS (2026 FDD) | Go Mini’s (2026 FDD) | |
|---|---|---|
| Total initial investment | $518,000 to $1,269,400 | $759,024 to $1,247,125 |
| Initial franchise fee | $55,500 for 300,000 population, up to $222,000 at 1,200,000 | $85,000 for about 800,000 population, plus $10,000 per additional 100,000 |
| Container fleet line | $168,300 to $434,400 (50 to 120 containers) | $604,800 to $787,200 (96 container minimum) |
| Delivery equipment | $225,000 to $300,000 including forklift | $5,250 to $160,000 per transport vehicle |
| Royalty | 4% for six months, 6% for six months, then 8% | 8% of gross sales, $400 monthly minimum |
| Ad and brand fund | 2% plus $3,000 to $4,500 monthly local spend | 2% |
| Outlets | 67 franchised, 2 affiliate (Dec 31, 2025) | 104 franchised, 1 company (Dec 31, 2025) |
| Item 19 | yes, revenue and operating contribution | none in the 2026 filing |
| Agreement term | 10 years | 10 years |
Read the fee row carefully. It is the line most likely to be misquoted. UNITS charges $55,500 for a 300,000-person protected territory and adds $18,500 for each additional 100,000 people, topping out at exactly $222,000 for the 1,200,000-person territory the franchisor calls its typical maximum. A Micro Territory of fewer than 300,000 people pays the same $55,500. That $18,500 increment gets scraped and republished as though it were the franchise fee. It is not.
Go Mini’s charges $85,000 for roughly 800,000 people and adds $10,000 per additional 100,000. US military veterans with credentials pay $68,000, and an existing dealer from a competing concept who already owns 80 or more containers pays $50,000.
See the full UNITS FDD data sheet
Both Item 7 tables say the same thing about where the money goes, and it is not the franchisor’s initial fee.
Go Mini’s requires 96 containers before opening, plus six more for every 100,000 people above 800,000. At the franchisor’s quoted prices, up to $8,200 for a 20-foot unit and $5,700 for a 12-foot, that starting fleet runs $604,800 to $787,200. The buying does not stop at opening. You must add at least 12 per year for each 100,000 population until you hold 48 per 100,000, which on an 800,000-person territory means 96 more a year until you reach 384.
UNITS scales its container minimum to territory size. A Micro Territory under 300,000 people opens with 50 containers and must hold 75 by the end of year one. Small and Medium markets, covering 300,000 to 899,999 people, open with 90 and reach 120. A Large territory of 900,000 to 1,200,000 opens with 120 and reaches 160. After the first year the required additions run 25 to 50 containers annually. Item 7 prices a 50-container opening fleet at $168,300 and a 120-container fleet at $434,400, roughly $3,366 to $3,620 per unit, then adds $225,000 to $300,000 for the delivery system and forklift.
That 50-container floor is why the UNITS low end fell from $732,640 in the 2025 filing to $518,000 in the 2026 one. The top of the range did not move. The smallest territory the brand will sell got cheaper to stock, not the business.
Tariffs sit outside the range entirely. Item 7 states the container costs exclude tariffs and that the tariff amount is passed through in full to the purchaser, and Item 8 makes tariffs, customs and agriculture inspections, port charges, and storage fees the franchisee’s responsibility, payable before delivery. Containers come from one approved supplier, Boxwell. Whatever trade policy does to imported steel boxes lands on the franchisee and appears nowhere in the Item 7 total.
You are underwriting a fleet and a yard. The trademark is the cheap part.
The UNITS Item 19 is the most useful document in the category, and it is unusually honest about the ramp. The measured sample in the 2026 filing is 62 traditional franchises reporting for the 2025 calendar year, drawn from the 67 franchised locations open at December 31, 2025, three of which run as fractional franchises. One traditional franchise that began operating during 2025 is excluded. Across all 62, median annual revenue was $664,886 and median annual operational contribution was $62,433, a 9.4% margin. The franchisor then splits that same population by how long each location had been open.
| Cohort | Median annual revenue | Median operational contribution | Median margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open 24 to 48 months | $550,832 | ($22,784) | (4.1%) |
| Open 48 months or longer | $706,608 | $66,526 | 9.4% |
| All 62 locations | $664,886 | $62,433 | 9.4% |
Locations still inside their fourth year lose money at the median. Locations past the four-year mark clear roughly $66,500. The blended $62,433 sits between those two realities and describes almost nobody exactly.
Notice who is missing. Every location in this table is at least 24 months old, and the arithmetic behind the averages puts 9 franchises in the 24-to-48-month band and 53 past 48 months. The 2025 filing broke out a 12-to-24-month cohort; the 2026 filing does not. The first ramp year is no longer disclosed at all, so the worst stretch of the curve is something you now have to ask about rather than read.
Note what operational contribution excludes. The UNITS footnotes define the expense stack as cost of goods, advertising, auto insurance and repair, equipment repair, fuel, health insurance, rent on the storage center, card fees, payroll processing and payroll taxes, container repair, royalty, uniforms, utilities, wages, and workers compensation. Debt service on a half-million-dollar-plus capital stack is not in there, and neither is depreciation. If you financed the fleet, the interest comes out of that $62,433 before anything reaches you.
Spread matters as much as the median. Of the 62 measured locations in 2025, 15 booked under $500,000 and 14 cleared $1,000,000. Roughly a quarter of the measured system sat under half a million dollars in revenue, against an investment the filing floors at $518,000 for the smallest territory it will sell.
Go Mini’s 2026 filing states plainly that the franchisor makes no representations about future or past financial performance of company-owned, affiliate-owned, or franchised outlets. No table. No sample.
The 2025 filing had one. It reported gross sales for the 96 franchised outlets open at least 12 months as of December 31, 2024, sorted by how many territories each franchisee held.
| 2025 filing, territories held | Reporting franchisees | Average gross sales | Median gross sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 territory | 32 | $258,353 | $229,516 |
| 2 to 3 territories | 13 | $423,554 | $331,508 |
| 4 to 7 territories | 6 | $922,339 | $677,739 |
A single-territory franchisee posted a median of $229,516 in gross sales, inside a system where the lowest disclosed investment is $759,024. The bottom of that band was $8,241 for the year. Multi-territory operators earned multiples of it, the clearest signal in the document about what scale this model requires.
None of that appears in the 2026 document. A franchisor is not obligated to publish an Item 19 and dropping one is legal, but it is also information. Ask Go Mini’s why the current filing went silent, and ask for the substantiation behind the 2025 tables while you are at it.
Both systems have also stopped growing. Go Mini’s franchised outlets ended 2023 at 104, 2024 at 106, and 2025 back at 104. UNITS opened 12 franchised outlets in 2023 and closed that year at 72, then slipped to 71 in 2024 and 67 in 2025. Its Item 20 records no terminations and no non-renewals for 2025: all five departures are logged as ceasing operations for other reasons.
Go Mini’s own history is a useful footnote for anyone comparing this category to the U-Haul dealer model. From 2002 through 2009 the Go Mini’s parent ran about 85 independent dealers under roughly 136 dealer agreements, then stopped offering them and moved the system to franchising. That is why the current schedule discounts a converting dealer to a $50,000 fee and a 7% royalty.
A dealer agreement gives you no territory and no term, and leaves you nothing to sell. A franchise contract gives you all of that and charges for it. For PODS the question stays open: a franchised PODS market is a franchise with whatever fee and territory its paperwork specifies, and we have not read it.
If the appeal was the PODS name, you are chasing the strongest consumer brand in the category and the one with the least available documentation. Most customers say PODS the way they say Kleenex, and that recognition is worth real money to whoever holds the territory. It is not worth an unverifiable investment estimate.
If the appeal was the business, the two filings above show what underwriting looks like here: $518,000 at the absolute floor and past $1.2 million for a 1,200,000-person territory, most of it in steel and trucks, a ramp that still loses money at the median in years three and four, and a mature median operational contribution near $66,500 before debt service. Our portable storage rankings put the disclosed figures side by side, and the fixed-facility comparison covers the real-estate alternative.
VetMyFranchise reads the filed Franchise Disclosure Document, Items 5, 7, and 19 included, rather than a brand’s recruitment page. Where no document exists, as with PODS, we say so instead of publishing a number.
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is pods a franchiseportable storage franchisePODS ownershipUNITS franchiseGo Mini's franchiseitem 19container storage
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.
Partly. PODS operates as a hybrid system, with company-run markets and franchised markets under the same brand across more than 150 locations in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. The large metropolitan markets are on the corporate side. Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan has owned the company since February 2015, when it acquired the brand from an ownership group led by Arcapita in a deal valued at more than $1 billion. Whether PODS is granting new US franchise territories today is not something we were able to verify.
We cannot tell you, and neither can anyone quoting a number without a filing behind it. Our database holds no PODS Franchise Disclosure Document, which means no verified Item 5 fee, no Item 7 investment table, and no Item 19 earnings data. The category comparables we can verify are UNITS at $518,000 to $1,269,400 and Go Mini's at $759,024 to $1,247,125. Container storage is a capital-heavy business in every filing we have read, so treat any figure well below that band with suspicion.
UNITS Moving and Portable Storage and Go Mini's are the two brands in the category whose current disclosure documents we hold. UNITS asks a franchise fee that scales with territory population, from $55,500 for 300,000 people to $222,000 for 1,200,000, inside a total investment of $518,000 to $1,269,400. Go Mini's asks $85,000 for roughly 800,000 people, rising $10,000 per additional 100,000, inside a total of $759,024 to $1,247,125. Both run 10-year agreements.
The one current Item 19 in the category says yes, thinly, and only well after the ramp. In its 2026 filing UNITS reports a $664,886 median annual revenue across the 62 traditional franchises that reported for the 2025 calendar year, with median annual operational contribution of $62,433, a 9.4% margin. Split by maturity, locations open 24 to 48 months posted a median operational contribution of negative $22,784, while those open 48 months or longer posted $66,526. Fifteen of the 62 booked under $500,000 in revenue.
No, and the distinction matters. A U-Haul dealer pays nothing to join, earns a commission, and receives no disclosure document because no required payment means no franchise under the FTC Franchise Rule. A PODS franchised market is a franchise relationship with a fee and an agreement behind it. Go Mini's ran a dealer network of its own from 2002 to 2009 under roughly 136 dealer agreements, then stopped offering them and moved to franchising, which is why its current filing offers converting container dealers a reduced $50,000 fee.
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