Scooter's Coffee franchise cost 2026: $1.16M-$1.35M kiosk investment, $40K fee, 6% royalty. Item 19 discloses a $966,739 median across 761 participating kiosks.
Quick answer A Scooter's Coffee kiosk costs $1,163,650 to $1,345,750 per the 2026 FDD, including a $40,000 franchise fee and a separate $20,000 opening support fee. Item 19 discloses median gross sales of $966,739 across 761 participating franchised kiosks in 2025. Royalty is 6% plus a 2% ad fund.
Scooter’s Coffee is the fastest-growing drive-thru coffee chain you can actually buy. 906 total units. 85 new franchised openings in 2025. And the 2026 FDD discloses both halves of the equation, which is more than most brands in this category do.
The revenue number is $966,739. That is the median gross sales across 761 participating franchised kiosk stores in 2025, with an average of $999,869 and a spread running from $337,233 to $2,458,874.
The cost number is $1,163,650 to $1,345,750 for a kiosk store, not including land.
Put those side by side and the deal announces itself. You are spending roughly $1.25M to buy about $967,000 of annual gross sales, a revenue-to-investment ratio below 1x before you have paid anyone. Compare that to a home services franchise turning 3x or better on the same capital and you understand why site selection carries so much weight here: the model has no slack for a mediocre corner.
The second number is the royalty stack: 6% royalty plus a 2% ad fund on net sales, weekly, for the life of the agreement. On a coffee unit with a 60-65% gross margin and 25-30% labor, that 8% consumes a meaningful share of what is left after store-level operating expenses.
You can build a real business inside that math. Plenty of Scooter’s franchisees are. But you need to walk into it with the math actually built — not the franchisor’s marketing math, and not a generic “drive-thru coffee is hot” thesis.
Here’s the structural cost picture pulled directly from the 2026 Scooter’s Coffee FDD:
| Item | 2026 FDD Number |
|---|---|
| Kiosk store investment | $1,163,650 to $1,345,750 (excludes land purchase) |
| Site and building improvements | $725,200 to $772,000 |
| Franchise fee | $40,000 |
| Initial opening support fee | $20,000, also due at signing |
| Royalty | 6% of net sales |
| Ad fund | 2% of net sales |
| Local marketing | Required, additional spend |
| Total units (franchised + affiliate) | 906 (881 + 25) |
| Kiosk / end cap / other split | 768 / 62 / 51 franchised |
| 2025 openings | 85 franchised |
| 2025 closures | 24 franchised |
| Item 19 median gross sales | $966,739 across 761 participating kiosks |
Two things in that table get missed. The investment figure excludes the purchase of land, so a buyer who wants to own the pad rather than lease it is adding several hundred thousand dollars on top. And the $40,000 franchise fee is not the only signing-day payment: a separate $20,000 initial opening support fee is due at the same moment, putting $60,000 with the franchisor before site work begins.
Site and building improvements at $725,200 to $772,000 are roughly 60% of the total. That is the line to interrogate with your contractor, because it is where a difficult site quietly becomes an expensive one.
For what’s actually inside the fee structure and where buyers most often misunderstand it, the FDD Item 5 deep-dive walks through the full disclosure category by category.
Scooter’s discloses more than most drive-thru coffee brands, and the exclusions are where the reading happens.
The disclosure covers franchised kiosk and end-cap drive-thru stores. It leaves out non-traditional stores and coffeehouse stores, and the FDD gives the reason plainly: the franchisor is not actively marketing those formats. It also excludes every affiliate-owned store, which is the right call for a buyer, since you want to see franchisee results rather than corporate ones.
Within the kiosk table, “participating” means open and operating for the entire 12-month measurement period. In 2025 that was 761 of the 768 franchised kiosks open at year end. That is 99% coverage, which is unusually complete. Stores that closed permanently during a period are excluded, and the FDD names those counts year by year: 0, 2, 2, 14, and 22 across 2021 through 2025.
The five-year table is the part worth your time:
| Measurement period | Participating kiosks | Average gross sales | Median gross sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 761 | $999,869 | $966,739 |
| 2024 | 605 | $914,719 | $880,794 |
| 2023 | 424 | $877,495 | $869,610 |
| 2022 | 275 | $876,519 | $855,908 |
Median gross sales climbed 12.9% from 2022 to 2025 while the store count nearly tripled. Systems that grow fast usually dilute their averages, because new units drag the mean down. Scooter’s did not. That is a genuine signal, and it is stronger evidence than any single year’s median.
The number the table does not give you is profit. Gross sales at $966,739 tells you nothing about what an owner keeps after product, labor, rent, royalty, and debt service on a $1.2M build. For how disclosed revenue figures can still mislead, see the survivorship bias problem, and Item 19 explained covers the legal mechanics of what a franchisor may and may not tell you outside the document.
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Published medians do not remove the diligence work. They redirect it.
Underwrite against the distribution, not the midpoint. The 2025 range runs $337,233 to $2,458,874. A store at the 25th percentile is a fundamentally different business from one at the 75th, on nearly identical capital. Ask your franchise development contact where stores in trade areas comparable to yours have landed.
Run validation calls on margin, not revenue. You already have revenue. Item 20 lists contact information for current and recently departed operators. Call 8 to 12 of them and ask what falls to the owner after everything, and what the first 18 months looked like before the store stabilized.
Check the cohort math in Item 20. Transfer and termination activity is a structural signal independent of any sales figure. The FDD’s own permanent-closure counts rose from 2 in 2023 to 14 in 2024 to 22 in 2025 as the base grew. Watch whether that rate is growing faster than the store count. For the methodology, see the closure rate calculation.
Compare on like terms. Scooter’s discloses gross sales. Several competitors disclose net sales, which run lower on the same store. Our coffee franchise comparison puts the category’s medians side by side with each sample definition labeled, which is the only way that comparison means anything.
Scooter’s chose a drive-thru-only physical format. That choice has a structural cost.
The advantage: no dining room. No tables, no bathrooms for customers (employee bathroom only), no general-public seating to clean and police. Lower labor, lower occupancy, simpler operations. A drive-thru-only unit can be staffed by 3-5 people per shift instead of the 6-9 a Starbucks-style café would need.
The cost: the real estate has to be exactly right. Drive-thru-only fails on three failure modes a sit-down coffee shop would survive:
For more on how lease and real estate decisions structure franchise unit economics, the real estate lease negotiation guide covers what to negotiate before signing.
A 6% royalty on net sales sounds modest until you build out the multi-year math.
Take a Scooter’s unit doing $900K in annual sales (a reasonable middle-of-range estimate based on competitor data). The royalty math:
Over a 10-year initial term — Scooter’s standard franchise agreement term — that’s $810,000 in franchisor payments on a single unit at the $900K AUV assumption. Compare that to the $40,000 initial franchise fee, and the real cost of the franchise relationship isn’t the fee at signing — it’s the royalty stream over 10 years.
The math gets worse on lower-volume units (royalty stays at 6%, so a $600K-AUV unit still pays the same percentage but has thinner cushion) and slightly better on higher-volume units (where percentages amortize across more revenue).
The brand is a clean buy for real estate operators who already control or can source pad-site corners in growth markets and can do the site selection work themselves. It also fits multi-unit operators with experience scaling QSR or drive-thru concepts and the capital to commit to a 3-5 unit area development agreement, and strong-credit buyers who can carry SBA debt on a $1M+ project with a 20-30% lender haircut on projected revenue. Operators with patience for a 2-3 year path to stabilized cash flow per unit, especially in unsaturated markets, tend to do well.
Where Scooter’s struggles is the opposite profile. First-time single-unit buyers who read the $966,739 median as a forecast rather than a midpoint will underwrite the wrong store, because half the system sits below it and the bottom of the range is $337,233. Owner-operators expecting to work the counter rather than manage a manager-led model find the operating cadence mismatched. Buyers without real estate networks will be at the franchisor’s mercy on site selection in competitive metros. And tight-capital buyers who cannot carry 6 to 9 months of working capital on top of a $1.16M build will be exposed to the first ramp shortfall.
Compare Scooter’s against two other coffee franchises with our 3-pack — $99 →
A buyer comparison that comes up almost every day in our analysis: Scooter’s vs. Dutch Bros. The honest answer is that you can’t actually buy Dutch Bros — it’s a corporate-only operation. Dutch Bros went public in 2021 and has stayed corporate-operated through 2026. There is no Dutch Bros franchise FDD because there is no Dutch Bros franchise.
That makes Scooter’s the closest franchisable analog to the Dutch Bros playbook. Same drive-thru-only positioning. Same flavor-forward menu emphasis. Same target customer in the daily-habit coffee category. Different ownership model.
For franchise buyers wanting to participate in the drive-thru coffee category, the choice isn’t Scooter’s vs. Dutch Bros — it’s Scooter’s vs. 7Brew, Dunkin’ (with full menu), the smaller regional drive-thru chains, or building independently. The Dunkin’ vs Scooter’s comparison covers the head-to-head with Dunkin’ specifically.
If Scooter’s is on your shortlist, here’s the diligence work to do before you commit:
For the full 30-day FDD review workflow we recommend before any franchise signing, the 30-day FDD plan is the structured approach.
The Scooter’s opportunity is real. The brand has grown 9% in unit count year over year while most QSR is flat, and its median gross sales rose 12.9% from 2022 to 2025 while the store base nearly tripled, which is the harder trick. The structural costs are equally real: a $1.16M entry against a sub-1x revenue ratio, acute real estate sensitivity, and an 8% royalty stack that never goes away. The disclosure gives you enough to run this math properly. Run it before you sign, not after.
That’s the answer to “should I buy Scooter’s.” The work to get there is the harder question.
For a category-level overview and side-by-side comparisons, see Coffee Shop Franchise Industry: Cost and Profitability Analysis 2026.
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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 puts a kiosk store at $1,163,650 to $1,345,750, not including the purchase of land. Site and building improvements are the largest line at $725,200 to $772,000. On top of the $40,000 franchise fee there is a separate $20,000 initial opening support fee, both due at signing, so $60,000 goes to the franchisor before you break ground. The remaining capital deploys across the 6 to 9 months from agreement to grand opening.
Yes. The 2026 FDD discloses median gross sales of $966,739 and average gross sales of $999,869 across 761 participating franchised kiosk stores for 2025, with a low of $337,233 and a high of $2,458,874. It also prints a five-year table, so you can watch the median climb from $776,635 in 2021. Read the exclusions: the disclosure covers franchised kiosk and end-cap drive-thrus only, leaving out non-traditional stores, coffeehouse stores, and every affiliate-owned location.
Fast — 85 new franchised units opened in 2025 against only 24 closures, a 3.5-to-1 opening-to-closure ratio that signals an aggressive franchise development pipeline. The system has 906 total units across the U.S. as of the 2026 FDD, weighted heavily toward the Midwest and South. The trajectory has matched or outpaced the broader drive-thru coffee category, which is the fastest-growing segment in QSR coffee through 2026.
Royalty is 6% of net sales, paid weekly. The national advertising fund contribution is 2% to 4% of net sales — the actual number depends on system-wide decisions disclosed in the FDD and may shift within that range over time. Combined, royalty plus ad fund is 8% to 10% of every dollar of revenue, paid for the life of the franchise agreement. Local marketing spend is additional and required at the franchisee's expense.
It depends on your real estate access and your capital position. Scooter's discloses a deeper Item 19 than most drive-thru coffee brands, with 761 participating kiosks and five years of medians, so you can underwrite this deal on published data rather than guesswork. The harder questions are capital and site. A $1.16M to $1.35M kiosk against a $966,739 median is a revenue-to-investment ratio below 1x, which means the deal lives or dies on margin and on landing in the upper half of that $337,233 to $2,458,874 range. For experienced operators with real estate networks, the model works. For first-time buyers without site-scouting capability, the corner is the risk.
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