Big O Tires vs Midas in 2026: TBC still owns Big O, Mavis now owns Midas. Compare fees, royalties, unit counts, and both Item 19 disclosures.
Quick answer Big O Tires is a wholly owned TBC Corporation subsidiary, and Midas has belonged to Mavis since that deal closed on June 16, 2025, so the two brands no longer share an owner. Big O charges a $17,500 franchise fee against a 3.5% to 5.0% royalty matrix and disclosed average gross revenues of $2,824,712.79 across 457 stores. Midas charges $35,000 against a 2% to 10% royalty and disclosed quartile averages running from $2,141,832 down to $676,751 across 856 shops. Both brands disclose Item 19.
Until 2025, Big O Tires and Midas answered to the same owner. TBC Corporation held both. Mavis bought TBC’s company-owned NTB and Tire Kingdom chains in 2023, agreed to buy Midas on March 31, 2025, and closed that deal on June 16, 2025. Big O did not move, and TBC has said it intends to keep expanding the brand.
The Big O Tires FDD issued June 30, 2025 spells the structure out in Item 1: Big O Tires, LLC sits under TBC Shared Services, LLC, which sits under TBC Corporation, which is owned by TBC Holdings, LLC. A fourth entity, TBC Retail Holdings, manages the brand. The Midas FDD issued April 16, 2026 names Metis HoldCo, Inc. as ultimate parent, lists the Mavis companies as intermediate parents, and describes Mavis as an operator of more than 2,300 service centers across 39 states.
That history matters for anyone reading an older writeup on these two. Any comparison that files Big O under Mavis and Midas under TBC has the ownership backwards, and every conclusion built on it about parent strategy is unreliable.
The two systems overlap more than the branding suggests. Big O’s Item 6 defines service department sales as non-tire work covering air conditioning, alignment, batteries, brakes, front end repairs, fluid replacement, inspections, maintenance, shocks and struts, and oil changes. So Big O stores do brake work. The FDD also discourages leaning on it: once service department sales pass 40% of gross sales, the excess gets reclassified and the royalty rate on it drops to 2%, which tells you exactly where the franchisor wants the revenue mix to sit.
Midas Item 1 lists brake system repair and replacement, tire mounting and balancing, exhaust service, suspension and steering, wheel alignment, batteries, starting and charging, heating and cooling, and CV joint and drive shaft work. Tires are one line among many. Midas has been in the exhaust business since 1954 and has franchised since 1956.
The practical split: Big O is tire-anchored with service attached, and its royalty schedule pushes it that way. Midas is service-anchored with tires attached.
| Dimension | Big O Tires | Midas |
|---|---|---|
| FDD issuance date | June 30, 2025 | April 16, 2026 |
| US franchised units | 461 (FYE March 31, 2025) | 889 (December 31, 2025) |
| Company-owned units | 0 | 111 |
| Franchising since | 1962 (predecessor) | 1956 |
| Parent | TBC Corporation | Mavis (Metis HoldCo, Inc.) |
Big O’s franchised count has been close to flat: 434 to 460, then 460 to 462, then 462 to 461 across the three fiscal years ending March 31. Company-owned stores went 32, then 17, then zero, and stayed at zero. In the year ending March 31, 2025 the brand opened 8 stores, terminated 4, recorded 2 non-renewals, and saw 3 stores cease operations for other reasons.
Midas looks worse at a glance and is not. Franchised shops held at 971, 972, and 975 through 2024, then dropped to 889 during 2025. Only 3 of those exits were terminations and 5 ceased for other reasons, against 33 new openings. The 86-unit decline came almost entirely from 111 shops the franchisor reacquired, concentrated in Ohio (66), New York (16), Pennsylvania (14), Georgia (7), Michigan (5), and Kentucky (3). Company-owned units went from zero to 111 in the same twelve months. Mavis pulled shops in house rather than losing them, which is a different signal than a wave of failures, and a different risk.
| Dimension | Big O Tires | Midas |
|---|---|---|
| Initial franchise fee | $17,500 | $35,000 |
| Total investment | $511,500 to $1,882,500 (cover page) | $385,450 to $940,050, new 8-bay shop, real estate excluded |
| Royalty | 5.0% partial opening year, then a 3.5% to 5.0% matrix | 2% to 10% of net revenue, up to 11% co-branded |
| Advertising | 4% local fund minimum, currently 3.6%, plus 0.9% national | Item 6 defers to a note our extraction does not capture |
| Initial inventory | $75,000 to $187,500 | $25,700 to $103,000 |
Big O’s $17,500 fee splits into $10,000 with the application and $7,500 at signing. Veterans and first responders have it waived. A five-year employee leaving to run a store, or an existing franchisee opening an additional unit by June 30, 2026, can bring it down to $10,000.
The royalty is where Big O gets interesting. The rate runs 5.0% from opening through the end of that calendar year, then moves onto a Royalty Matrix that Big O updates annually, with a 5.0% ceiling and a 3.5% floor set by adjusted gross sales. National account, key account, and farm-class tire sales stay at 2%, as do service department sales above the 40% threshold. Advertising sits on top of all of it: a local fund contribution with a 4% minimum, currently reduced to 3.6%, plus a national marketing fee currently at 0.9% and capped at 1%. A store sitting at the matrix ceiling is therefore paying roughly 9.5% of sales in royalty plus advertising.
Midas is easier to state and harder to pin down. Royalty runs 2% to 10% of net revenue, rising to 11% for a co-branded shop, with the schedule held in a footnote. The advertising line in Item 6 defers to that same footnote, which our extraction does not carry. Anyone underwriting Midas should get the marketing fee in writing before signing anything.
The investment figures need a caveat on both sides. Midas discloses $385,450 to $940,050 for a new 8-bay shop of 5,000 to 7,400 square feet, and that assumes you lease the premises. Buying acceptable land runs $615,000 to $1,250,000, construction another $1,250,000 to $2,050,000. Converting an existing automotive facility runs $143,400 to $941,050. The Big O range above comes off the FDD cover page; the Item 7 line-item table itself is not in our extraction, so treat $511,500 to $1,882,500 as the franchisor’s own summary rather than a build you can audit item by item.
For the disclosed fee schedules, the Big O Tires fees page and Midas fees page carry the full tables.
Big O’s Item 19 has two parts, and the second is more generous than most tire FDDs. Part A reports average annual gross revenues for the 457 franchised stores that operated all of 2024 and reported every month, out of 463 franchised stores open at year end. The average was $2,824,712.79, and 187 stores, or 40.9%, beat it. Part B covers the 280 stores that also submitted expense data: average total income of $2,941,799, cost of goods sold at 42.1%, gross profit at 57.9%, total labor at 26.7%, total operating expenses at 49.1%, and net income from operations at 8.8%.
Midas reports quartile averages for the 856 franchisees that operated the full 2025 calendar year:
| Quartile | Average gross revenue |
|---|---|
| Top | $2,141,832 |
| Top middle | $1,344,577 |
| Bottom middle | $1,027,246 |
| Bottom | $676,751 |
Midas also breaks out average revenue per customer visit by quartile, from $542 at the top to $254 at the bottom, and publishes a Google rating table alongside it.
Read side by side, the average Big O store out-earns the average shop in Midas’s top quartile. That is what a tire-anchored ticket does: fewer visits, far larger ones. The Midas per-visit averages of $254 to $542 are the other face of the same model.
Two cautions before either number goes into a model. Big O’s Part B sample is self-selected, 280 of 463 stores, and its tables exclude sales, payroll, and income taxes, which the FDD says vary widely by location. And the Midas figures are group averages, not percentiles: the bottom quartile average of $676,751 covers shops running anywhere from $236,466 to $887,502.
The full disclosures sit on the Big O Tires financials page and the Midas financials page. Item 19 is the only place the FTC Franchise Rule lets a franchisor make financial performance claims, and it stays optional, so read what each one chose to leave out.
Comparing Big O Tires and Midas seriously? The full 12-section FDD analysis covers Item 19 earnings, litigation history, fee footnotes, and a buyer verdict personalized to your capital and market: $49 per brand, or three brands for $99 if you’re comparing finalists.
TBC runs Big O as a franchise-only system. Company-owned stores hit zero by March 2024 and have stayed there, which removes the corporate-versus-franchise conflict entirely. TBC affiliates do sell into the system: Carroll’s, LLC, doing business as National Tire Wholesale, and TBC Brands both supply franchisees, and Big O expects to supply roughly 90% of a new store’s initial tire inventory and 80% or more of ongoing tire purchases. That is procurement scale and supplier concentration described in the same paragraph, and a buyer should price both.
Mavis runs Midas differently. Reacquiring 111 shops in a single year turned a franchise-only system into one with a company-owned arm, and Mavis separately operates its 2,300-plus locations under the Mavis Discount Tire and Mavis Tires & Brakes names. The Midas FDD also names Tuffy Tire & Auto Service as an affiliate under the same ownership, running its own separate network of 111 franchised and 51 company-owned centers that offer much the same services as a Midas shop.
So the practical question for a franchisee is whether the owner competes with you locally. Big O’s answer today is that it operates no stores of its own. Midas’s answer is 111 of them, in six named states. Territory diligence should start there. For more on how the ownership picture got misreported, the Big O Tires after the Mavis acquisition post traces what actually changed hands.
Big O suits an operator with tire-industry background and procurement instincts, working in the western or central states where the 461-store footprint is concentrated across roughly two dozen states from Arizona and California through Colorado, Missouri, and Texas. It suits buyers who can fund the larger disclosed range, who want a franchisor with no stores of its own, and who are comfortable with a supply relationship where the franchisor is also the main vendor.
Midas suits a general automotive service operator with technicians across several specialties, or one converting an existing shop, since the conversion range starts at $143,400. It suits buyers who want national territory options and who read a four-quartile disclosure as more honest than a single average. It suits them less if the target market is one of the six states where Mavis now runs company shops.
Three variables settle it for most buyers.
Ticket size versus visit frequency. Big O’s disclosed average of $2.82 million per store against Midas’s $676,751 to $2.14 million quartile band is not a quality gap, it is a business model gap. Decide which revenue shape you can staff and finance.
Capital. The Midas lease-based range is materially lower at the entry point, and the conversion path lower still. Big O’s cover-page floor of $511,500 sits above the Midas floor, and the ceiling is roughly double.
Owner posture. TBC has no company stores and says it plans to grow the franchise system. Mavis just took 111 shops in house. Neither is disqualifying, but they lead to different questions in discovery, and the answers should go in writing.
For broader category context, the automotive franchise opportunities post covers additional brands beyond these two, and the is Big O Tires a good franchise post gives a deeper standalone verdict on Big O. Both brands sit inside the wider ranking in best auto repair franchises, where Item 19 sample definitions turn out to matter more than headline revenue.
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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.
TBC Corporation owns Big O Tires. Item 1 of the FDD issued June 30, 2025 places Big O Tires, LLC under TBC Shared Services, LLC, under TBC Corporation, under TBC Holdings, LLC. Mavis owns Midas. The two companies agreed to the sale on March 31, 2025 and closed it on June 16, 2025, and the Midas FDD issued April 16, 2026 names Metis HoldCo, Inc. as ultimate parent with the Mavis entities in between. Mavis had earlier bought TBC's NTB and Tire Kingdom chains in 2023. Older comparisons that put Big O under Mavis have the chart reversed.
Both fix brakes and sell tires, so the difference is emphasis. Big O is tire-anchored, and its royalty schedule enforces that: service department sales above 40% of gross sales get reclassified and drop to a 2% royalty rate. Midas started in exhaust work in 1954 and treats tires as one line among brakes, exhaust, suspension, alignment, batteries, heating and cooling, and drivetrain service.
They disclose differently rather than one being empty. Big O gives a single system average of $2,824,712.79 across 457 stores plus a cost structure for 280 stores that submitted expense data, including 8.8% net income from operations. Midas gives four quartile averages across 856 shops, which shows spread that a single average hides. If you want to see the bottom of the range, Midas is more revealing. If you want to see where the money goes, Big O is.
Big O, on the disclosed numbers. The Big O cover page puts total investment at $511,500 to $1,882,500, including $385,000 to $1,596,000 payable to the franchisor or its affiliates, with initial tire inventory alone at $75,000 to $187,500 and a 700-tire minimum after the first 180 days. Midas discloses $385,450 to $940,050 for a new 8-bay shop, though that assumes you lease. Buying land adds $615,000 to $1,250,000 and construction $1,250,000 to $2,050,000.
Start with the ticket. Big O runs a high-revenue, lower-frequency tire model concentrated in the western and central states, and its franchisor operates no company stores. Midas runs a lower-ticket, higher-frequency service model with national coverage, and its owner now runs 111 company shops in Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Kentucky. If you are buying into one of those six states, ask directly about the company-owned footprint before you sign.
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