14 franchise brands where Item 19's average masks a brutal top-quartile-vs-bottom-quartile spread. Real P25/P50/P75 numbers from the 2026 FDD set.
Quick answer: Across 2,000+ franchise FDDs, 14 brands show a P75-to-P25 gap above $1.9M — meaning typical bottom-half operators earn a small fraction of typical top-half operators while the headline ‘average’ looks healthy. The list is dominated by home-service brands where territory and operator effort drive most variance. Use the brand’s P25, not the average, as your year-three downside case.
Open any franchisor’s sales deck and the Item 19 slide will lead with a single confident dollar figure. System average unit volume. $1.4 million. $2.8 million. Whatever. The number lands cleanly, anchors the conversation, and gives the buyer something to plug into a back-of-envelope projection.
The trick is that the average is the worst summary statistic for a buyer modeling year-three cash flow. It’s pulled up by a small number of high-AUV outliers, and in most franchise systems those outliers are not representative of what a new operator can build. They’re mature units in dense markets, often owned by multi-unit veterans who’ve been running the playbook for ten years. Their numbers are real. They’re just not yours.
The right number to anchor on is the P25 — the 25th-percentile revenue figure, the bottom of the middle half of the system. If you can’t beat the P25 within three years of opening, you’re below the bottom half of the brand. If the P25 looks survivable to you, the deal has a chance. If it doesn’t, the average doesn’t matter.
This piece is a list of 14 brands where the P75-to-P25 spread is wide enough that the headline average is doing a lot of misleading work. We pulled the data from the 2026 set of judge-verified Item 19 disclosures across the VetMyFranchise database (2,000+ FDDs total, filtered to brands with sample sizes of 10 or more units to keep the statistics meaningful).
A few patterns to scan for before you read a single line of the actual disclosure:
If you see two or three of these, the average is doing more selling than disclosing.
These are brands with judge-verified Item 19 disclosures, sample sizes of 10+ units, and a P75-to-P25 gap above $1.9M. The gap column is the dollar difference between a top-quartile and bottom-quartile unit — the practical span of revenue you might land inside if you bought this brand today.
| Brand | Units in Item 19 | P25 revenue | Median revenue | P75 revenue | P75–P25 gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mr. Rooter Plumbing | 188 | $320K | $1.27M | $4.98M | $4.66M |
| McAlister’s Deli | 464 | $543K | $1.79M | $5.03M | $4.48M |
| America’s Swimming Pool Co. | 124 | $39K | $572K | $3.94M | $3.90M |
| Aire Serv | 172 | $576K | $944K | $4.09M | $3.52M |
| Mister Sparky | 146 | $194K | $580K | $3.54M | $3.34M |
| One Hour Heating & Air | 359 | $150K | $790K | $3.33M | $3.18M |
| Ellie Mental Health | 167 | $46K | $765K | $2.88M | $2.83M |
| Urban Air Adventure Park | 123 | $3.27M | $4.35M | $5.95M | $2.68M |
| Rainbow Restoration | 275 | $109K | $612K | $2.78M | $2.67M |
| Buffalo Wild Wings | 527 | $2.37M | $3.44M | $4.88M | $2.50M |
| PuroClean | 387 | $100K | $519K | $2.56M | $2.46M |
| AlphaGraphics | 221 | $399K | $1.03M | $2.78M | $2.38M |
| Schlotzsky’s | 204 | $396K | $1.05M | $2.75M | $2.36M |
| Touching Hearts at Home | 62 | $256K | $935K | $2.55M | $2.30M |
A few patterns jump off the table. Home-service brands — Mr. Rooter, Aire Serv, ASP, Mister Sparky, One Hour, Rainbow, PuroClean — dominate the widest spreads. The reason is structural: home services are a route-density business, and bottom-quartile operators are typically newer, in lower-density territories, or running with one truck where a top-quartile operator runs six. The brand is the same. The business isn’t.
The Mr. Rooter line is the clearest illustration. P25 is $320K. P75 is just under $5M. Same brand, same playbook, 15x revenue difference between the bottom and top of the middle half of the system. If you bought Mr. Rooter and benchmarked your underwriting to the average, you’d be planning for a business that exists in roughly the top quarter of franchisees.
McAlister’s Deli is a different shape but similar story. The median is $1.79M but the P25 is $543K — meaning a quarter of stores in the disclosure are running at roughly the cost-of-goods break-even line. That doesn’t mean a quarter of stores are losing money, but it means a quarter of stores are running tight enough that one bad year tips them over.
This is one of the cross-brand patterns we pulled out of the full Item 19 transparency dataset. The full leaderboard — including the brands ranked by P25 disclosure quality, the brands that don’t disclose quartiles at all, and the brands where the average and median are close enough that the average is actually safe to use — lives in our Item 19 transparency leaderboard report. For a brand-by-brand AUV ranking, see the AUV leaderboard.
If you’re holding an FDD right now, the $49 Tier 2 report on any of these brands includes the full quartile distribution, sample size methodology, and a year-three downside model built off the P25, not the average.
Every brand in the table above carries a “supported” verdict on its Item 19 disclosure. That’s our internal grading: an AI judge reads the disclosure, checks whether the quartile or median claim is actually substantiated in the underlying tables (not just asserted), and flags brands where the disclosure says one thing and the data shows another. Brands with “unsupported” verdicts didn’t make this list because their headline numbers can’t be cross-checked.
The grade is not a fraud signal. It’s a transparency signal. A brand can be a great business with an “unsupported” Item 19 verdict — they just didn’t publish enough detail for us to confirm the average is what they say it is.
Not every brand on the wide-spread list deserves a frown. A few of them disclose so completely that the average isn’t actually misleading — you just have to read past it.
Urban Air Adventure Park has a wide spread ($2.68M from P25 to P75), but the P25 itself is $3.27M. The whole distribution is high. A buyer who looks only at the average sees $4.5M and underwrites optimistically; a buyer who looks at the P25 sees $3.27M and underwrites realistically. The disclosure is honest in both directions.
Buffalo Wild Wings publishes the full quartile range, the year-cohort breakdown, and the regional split. A buyer who reads the full disclosure can pin down their expected revenue band within a few hundred thousand dollars. The brand isn’t hiding anything; the wide spread reflects real geographic variance, not survivorship.
AlphaGraphics publishes by tenure cohort, which is exactly what a buyer wants to see for a service brand where revenue ramps over multiple years. The P25-to-P75 gap looks wide overall, but inside each tenure cohort the spread narrows substantially. A buyer who reads the cohort table doesn’t need to use the system average at all.
The pattern is the same in all three cases: the brand gave you what you need to underwrite conservatively. Whether the average is misleading depends on whether you let it be.
If you’ve already received a deck quoting the system average and you’re starting to suspect the distribution is uglier than the headline, the move is to ask three specific questions in writing.
First: “What is the P25 and P75 revenue for stores in the disclosure with at least 24 months of operating tenure?” The 24-month filter strips out the ramp-stage stores that drag the average down and lets you see what mature operators are actually earning. If the franchisor can’t or won’t answer, that’s your answer.
Second: “Of the stores below the system median revenue, what percentage are profitable on an owner-operator basis?” This is the question most franchisors don’t want to answer because it forces them to disclose how bottom-half stores actually perform. A confident franchisor will give you a number. A nervous one will redirect.
Third: “Can you connect me with three franchisees whose AUV is closest to the system P25?” The franchisor will offer to connect you with top performers. You want bottom-half performers. The mismatch in their reaction tells you more than the eventual call will.
If the brand passes all three filters, the wide spread probably reflects real operator-driven variance and your job is to convince yourself you’ll land above P50. If the brand fails any of them, the spread is hiding something and the average was doing the work it was supposed to do — for the franchisor, not for you.
A trap Item 19 is one where the franchisor publishes a high-sounding average revenue number while the underlying distribution is so spread that the bottom half of the system earns a small fraction of the top half. The average isn't false — it's just useless for predicting what a new operator will earn.
Because the FTC Franchise Rule allows it. An Item 19 disclosure can use any reasonable summary, and a top-heavy average is technically reasonable. Buyers who don't ask for the median, the quartiles, or the cohort breakdown only see the number the franchisor chose to put first.
Yes. The FTC Franchise Rule requires that any financial performance representation have a reasonable basis and be substantiated; it does not require a specific set of summary statistics. Many franchisors voluntarily report quartiles or median, but it isn't a legal floor.
Three ways: ask the franchisor's development team directly and put the request in writing, ask several existing franchisees during validation calls what their revenue is and where they sit relative to system AUV, or pull the brand's full FDD and look for quartile, decile, or cohort tables behind the headline average.
Not automatically. A wide spread means location and operator effort matter a lot — which can be a feature if you have a strong site and plan to run it yourself, or a serious risk if you're a semi-absentee multi-unit buyer. The spread tells you what kind of business it actually is.
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