Yes, Dairy Queen is a franchise. Berkshire Hathaway owns the franchisor. 2026 FDD: $45,000 fee, $1.51M–$2.55M investment, $1,413,799 median sales.
Quick answer Yes. American Dairy Queen Corporation franchises DQ Grill & Chill restaurants, and it reported 1,983 directly licensed franchised outlets against 2 affiliate-owned restaurants at the end of 2025. The 2026 FDD puts one restaurant at $1,510,100 to $2,550,100 excluding land, on a $45,000 franchise fee and a 4% continuing license fee.
American Dairy Queen Corporation is a Delaware corporation incorporated in 1962, run out of Bloomington, Minnesota. Item 1 of its 2026 disclosure document states that ADQ is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Dairy Queen, Inc., which is itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. Berkshire has held the business since 1998.
That chain matters more than it looks. Berkshire owns a trademark and a fee stream. The restaurants belong to other people. ADQ operated no company-owned DQ Grill & Chill restaurants as of the March 26, 2026 issuance date of the current FDD, and an affiliate called DQ Training Restaurants, LLC owns two of them in Minnesota, one doubling as a training facility. Set that against 1,983 directly licensed franchised outlets at the end of 2025 and the corporate presence rounds to zero.
One scoping note. This is the DQ Grill & Chill FDD. Texas restaurants sell a different menu under a separate disclosure document, 524 of them at the end of 2025, and DQ Treat locations, 743 of them, run their own program. Item 1 puts the global system above 7,880 restaurants and stores, none of which the tables below describe.
| Term | 2026 DQ Grill & Chill FDD |
|---|---|
| Initial franchise fee | $45,000, including a $10,000 nonrefundable deposit with the application |
| Continuing license fee | 4% of gross sales |
| Sales promotion program fee | 5% to 6% of gross sales, set by ADQ within that range |
| Total initial investment | $1,510,100 to $2,550,100, land excluded |
| Land if purchased | generally $250,000 to $800,000 |
| Agreement term | 20 years, renewable once for the shorter of 10 years or the remaining lease |
| Renewal fee | $22,500 |
| Transfer fee | $6,000, rising $500 every five years from January 1, 2030 |
| Exclusive territory | none granted |
Two lines deserve a slower read. The recurring load is 9% to 10% of gross sales, and the variable half is not yours to model. Item 6 gives ADQ the right to set the sales promotion percentage anywhere in that range without regard to what other operators pay, on 90 days of notice. At the disclosed median, that single point of discretion is worth about $14,000 a year.
The second is working capital. Item 7 budgets $51,000 to $198,000 of additional funds for three months, on a project that starts at $1.51 million before land. Fifty-one thousand dollars of reserve against a build that size is thin, and a slow ramp lands on your balance sheet. ADQ also tells you what lenders will want: a 20% equity position on leasehold improvements and possibly 25% on equipment.
The build is prescriptive. The two current freestanding prototypes need lots of at least 25,830 and 32,026 square feet, and equipment with signage and point-of-sale hardware runs $550,000 to $700,000 of the total on its own.
Pull the American Dairy Queen data sheet if you want Items 5, 7, and 19 lined up in one place. We read the filed document, not the recruitment page.
Schedule A of the 2026 Item 19 reports median annual gross sales of $1,413,799 for calendar 2025. The number is real and narrow. Every restaurant in it was newly constructed, freestanding, developed under ADQ’s new or additional restaurant development programs, first opened between January 1, 2015 and December 31, 2024, reporting sales for all twelve months, and franchisee owned and operated.
The exclusions are the interesting part. Out go Texas restaurants, existing DQ restaurants that converted or remodeled into the Grill & Chill format, units inside fuel centers and malls and ferry terminals, and anything opened under a territory operator’s agreement. What remains is 286 restaurants out of 1,983 directly licensed franchised outlets, roughly one in seven, and the newest purpose-built seventh at that. For someone building a new restaurant that is arguably the right comparison set. For anyone reading it as what a Dairy Queen does, it is not.
| Year | Average gross sales | Median | High | Low | Restaurants in sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | $1,379,954 | $1,334,529 | $3,135,208 | $528,543 | 248 |
| 2023 | $1,417,964 | $1,368,130 | $3,336,388 | $568,696 | 282 |
| 2024 | $1,446,870 | $1,374,380 | $3,381,809 | $583,730 | 313 |
| 2025 | $1,485,731 | $1,413,799 | $3,148,939 | $601,647 | 286 |
Inside one year and one tightly defined cohort, one restaurant did $601,647 and another did $3,148,939, and 44% cleared the average. Deflate the four-year climb for menu inflation before you lean on it.
Schedule B adds cost lines, and this is where to slow down. For 2025 it covers 16 restaurants. Not 286. Sixteen, down from 203 the year before, because ADQ drops any restaurant that did not submit twelve full months of profit and loss data or whose statements varied from reported sales by 3% or more. Its own footnote then says 318 Schedule A restaurants were excluded in 2025, a figure that cannot be reconciled with a qualifying sample of 286. Ask about that in person.
Those 16 restaurants averaged manageable profit of 27.31% of sales. Read the definition first. Manageable profit is struck after cost of goods, labor, and restaurant controllables, and before occupancy, insurance, legal and accounting, the continuing license fee, and the sales promotion fee. At the disclosed median the franchisor’s share alone is roughly $127,000 to $141,000 a year that this figure has not yet paid, before rent and debt service.
Item 20 shows the directly licensed franchised count going from 1,970 at the start of 2025 to 1,983 at the end, on 38 openings against 24 terminations and one non-renewal. After two years of plus two, that reads like a turn.
The footnote undoes most of it. Of those 38 openings, 20 were conversions from another DQ concept, acquisitions of a territory operator’s rights in existing store agreements, or a company-owned outlet moving to a direct license. Eighteen were new buildings on new corners. Against 25 departures, the directly licensed system opened fewer restaurants than it lost.
The second ledger confirms it. Subfranchised outlets under territory operator agreements fell from 567 to 543 during 2025. Arizona is the clean case: 15 subfranchised Arizona outlets went to zero in the same year the directly licensed Arizona count rose from 35 to 50 on 15 openings. Those restaurants changed paperwork rather than addresses. Add both ledgers and the reported Grill & Chill and Brazier footprint went from 2,538 outlets to 2,528.
Set 38 openings beside 116 transfers of existing restaurants between franchisees, plus 33 more on the territory operator side. The resale market moves roughly four times as many Dairy Queens as construction does, and it makes the better first purchase, because a trading restaurant hands you three years of profit and loss statements instead of a projection.
This is not an owner-operator brand in the strict sense, and the distinction costs money. Item 15 requires a Controlling Owner holding 51% or more of the entity, but that person does not have to run the restaurant day to day. What you must have is one designated manager and two assistant managers who completed ADQ’s training, devote full time to on-premises management, and are barred from any involvement in another business. Three trained salaried people sit in the model before you take a dollar out.
Item 12 is blunt: “You will not receive an exclusive territory.” The grant is one restaurant at one approved address, and you may face competition from other franchisees and from channels ADQ controls. A relocation policy lets a qualifying street location move within two miles without a new franchise fee, and that is the extent of the geographic protection.
Multi-unit buyers use the MultiTRA program, offered to entities rather than individuals. The reservation fee is $22,500 per committed restaurant, credited back against each franchise fee as you develop, and missing a deadline on the commitment schedule lets ADQ terminate unless you open within 30 days or pay the late restaurant’s full fee to buy six more months. Staffing scales at one full-time supervisor per eight locations.
The public answer to “is Dairy Queen a franchise” is one word. The useful answer lives in four items. Read Item 5 for the fee and the conditions that reduce or refund it, Item 7 for the format you are actually building and the footnotes defining each row, Item 19 for which slice of the system the sales figures describe, and Item 20 for who left last year and why. Then call operators from Exhibit J, including the ones who sold.
Our ranking of ice cream and frozen yogurt franchises shows the same category at a fraction of the capital, and the scoop-shop model behind Ben & Jerry’s answers the same status question off a very different balance sheet. If $1.5 million is out of range, the food franchises that open under $250,000 are a more honest starting point than a Dairy Queen you would have to overleverage.
The American Dairy Queen file carries the 2026 Items 5, 7, and 19 as disclosed, with the sample definitions attached to the numbers rather than stripped off them.
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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.
Dairy Queen is a franchise. American Dairy Queen Corporation, the franchisor, operated no company-owned DQ Grill & Chill restaurants as of its March 26, 2026 disclosure document, and an affiliate owns just two of them in Minnesota. Against 1,983 directly licensed franchised outlets at the end of 2025, the corporate footprint inside this concept is close to nothing. Older territory operator agreements add another layer, with 543 subfranchised outlets running under agreements ADQ does not license directly.
The 2026 DQ Grill & Chill FDD estimates $1,510,100 to $2,550,100 for a single new restaurant, and that total excludes land. The initial franchise fee is $45,000, of which $10,000 is a nonrefundable deposit due with the application. Item 7 puts building and construction at $800,000 to $1,400,000 and equipment including signage and point-of-sale at $550,000 to $700,000. If you buy the land, the document adds a further $250,000 to $800,000 depending on the market.
The 2026 Item 19 reports median annual gross sales of $1,413,799 for 2025 across 286 restaurants, with an average of $1,485,731. The range inside that same sample runs from $601,647 to $3,148,939, and only 44% of those restaurants met or exceeded the average. Gross sales are not profit. The document's manageable profit figures stop before occupancy costs, insurance, the continuing license fee, and the sales promotion fee are deducted.
Yes, through two layers. Item 1 of the 2026 FDD states that American Dairy Queen Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Dairy Queen, Inc., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. of Omaha. Berkshire has held the business since 1998. What Berkshire owns is the trademark and the fee stream, since almost every restaurant carrying the sign belongs to an independent franchisee.
Yes, but under a different disclosure document. Item 1 explains that Texas DQ restaurants carry a separate food menu called Texas Country Food for historical reasons, and are offered under their own FDD with 524 locations operating at the end of 2025. Every figure in the DQ Grill & Chill document, including the Item 19 sales tables, explicitly excludes Texas restaurants. A Texas buyer needs the Texas document.
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