No. In-N-Out has never franchised since 1948. Every location is company-owned. Franchised burger alternatives: Freddy's $1,820,745 median, Five Guys.
Quick answer No. In-N-Out has never franchised. The Snyder family has owned every location since 1948, and growth stays inside the company supply network. Franchised burger alternatives exist: Freddy's discloses a $1,820,745 median across 477 franchised restaurants, and Five Guys runs 945 franchised units against 613 company-owned.
In-N-Out Burger has operated for seventy-eight years without selling a single franchise. Harry and Esther Snyder opened the first stand in Baldwin Park, California, in 1948, and the Snyder family has held the company ever since. There is no franchise disclosure document, no Item 5 fee, no Item 7 investment range, no Item 19 sales table. Every location is owned and operated by the company.
So the search term “in-n-out franchise cost” has no answer. The number is not confidential. It does not exist, because nothing is for sale. Any site quoting you a figure is either describing a different brand or making it up.
Two things hold the policy in place, and both are structural rather than sentimental.
The first is supply. In-N-Out has tied restaurant growth to its own production and distribution network rather than to franchisee capital. Patties move from company facilities to company restaurants, which caps how far and how fast the brand can open. A franchisor sells territory to whoever can fund it. In-N-Out can only build where its own trucks already run, and that single constraint explains the pace better than any statement about tradition.
Control over the operating model is the second. Franchising hands daily hiring, wage, and standards decisions to an independent owner whose incentives sit close to the franchisor’s but never match them exactly. In-N-Out kept those decisions in house. The trade is real, and it runs both ways: the company gave up the fastest growth path in restaurants along with the fee income attached to it.
The 2026 development that gets misread as a franchise announcement is the eastward move. As of April 2026, four In-N-Out restaurants were open in Tennessee: Lebanon, Antioch, Murfreesboro, and Franklin. The company has signaled up to 35 locations in the state and put $125.5 million into an office in Franklin.
Read what that spending pattern says. A franchisor entering a new region signs area developers, collects development fees from them, and lets those developers fund the buildings. In-N-Out bought the office itself. Tennessee is company capital deployed by a company that decided, again, not to sell its growth.
Three burger systems in our FDD database show what the paperwork looks like when a brand does franchise. Every figure below comes from the filed document.
| Five Guys | Freddy’s | Smashburger | |
|---|---|---|---|
| FDD year | 2025 | 2026 | 2026 |
| Initial fee | $25,000 | $35,000 | $40,000 |
| Total investment | $977,850 to $1,375,750 | $854,834 to $2,802,000 | $1,239,500 to $2,255,500 |
| Royalty | 6% | 5% | 5.5% |
| Marketing fund | 2% now, up to 4% | 2.5%, rising to 3% | 2.25%, up to 4% |
| Franchised units | 945 | 542 | 53 |
| Company units | 613 | 38 | 119 |
| Item 19 | none | yes | none |
The Freddy’s range covers three build formats. An in-line unit with no drive-thru starts at $854,834. A standalone with a drive-thru runs to $2,802,000. Quoting the low number as the cost of a Freddy’s is how buyers end up underfunded before they open.
Item 20 of the 2025 Five Guys FDD reports 1,558 total outlets at fiscal year-end 2024. That total breaks into 945 franchised and 613 company-owned. It is not 1,558 franchised, a mistake that appears across the web and inflates the system by 60%. About 39% of Five Guys is company-operated.
The franchised count also carries a history worth reading. Franchised outlets fell from 979 to 899 during 2022, recovered to 924 in 2023, and reached 945 in 2024. Three years of movement produced a net loss of 34 franchised units.
Two details sit in the fee items. Item 5 sets the franchise fee at $25,000, but a buyer also signs a development agreement carrying a $50,000 development fee per restaurant, with a one-restaurant minimum, and that fee is not credited against the franchise fee. Day one is $75,000, not $25,000. Item 19 of the same document then declines to say anything: Five Guys makes no representations about the past or future financial performance of company-owned or franchised outlets. Our Five Guys cost breakdown walks those Item 7 lines.
The 2026 Freddy’s FDD reports a median of $1,820,745 in annual gross receipts across 477 franchised restaurants open for the entire 2025 fiscal year. Receipts ranged from $644,497 to $4,164,361.
Read the segment label and the exclusions before the median. Those 477 restaurants exclude 43 that were not open all year, 19 franchised restaurants that closed during 2025, and 23 non-traditional units in stadiums, casinos, airports, and on college campuses. Dropping closures from a performance table is standard and legal, and it also removes the worst outcomes from the sample you are handed.
The quartile table is more useful than the median. The bottom quartile of 120 franchised restaurants averaged $1,227,582 in gross receipts, with a floor of $644,497. Against a build that can reach $2.8 million, a $644,497 store is not a slow start. That is a unit-economics failure.
Gross receipts are also not profit. Freddy’s discloses revenue plus a cost table drawn from its 38 company-owned restaurants, so the franchisee-side profit picture is yours to build through validation calls. The recurring load on top of the build: a 5% royalty, a marketing fund at 2.5% moving to 3.0% on October 8, 2026, and a mandatory $35,000 construction advisory fee on your first restaurant on top of the $35,000 license fee.
See what the Freddy’s FDD actually discloses. VetMyFranchise reads Items 5, 7, and 19 out of the filed document rather than the brand’s franchise development page.
Smashburger still sells franchises, at a $40,000 fee and $1,239,500 to $2,255,500 of investment. Its Item 20 is the reason to slow down. Franchised restaurants went 82 to 78 to 65 to 53 across 2023, 2024, and 2025. Company-owned units fell from 135 to 119 over the same stretch. The total system dropped from 217 restaurants to 172, a 21% contraction in three years, and the 2026 document adds that two more franchised restaurants ceased operations after December 28, 2025. There is no Item 19.
A shrinking system is not automatically a bad buy. A distressed brand sometimes offers real estate and terms a growing one never would. It does change what you are underwriting, because you are betting on a turnaround rather than on a unit model that already works.
The In-N-Out question is useful precisely because it has no paperwork behind it. Once a brand does franchise, the paperwork is the only part of the pitch carrying legal weight, and three items decide most of the outcome.
Item 7 gives you the real capital requirement, broken out by build format. Item 19 gives you what the franchisor will commit to in writing, and its segment label tells you who got excluded from the sample. Item 20 gives you the direction of travel, which is the closest thing to a franchisee satisfaction score available for free.
Compare those three items across brands before you compare logos. Our ranking of burger franchises puts the current options side by side, and the Five Guys franchise model post shows how a development agreement changes what even a single-restaurant buyer signs.
Browse the full franchise directory for 2,000+ brands with their FDD figures attached.
Not sure which franchise fits you yet?
Take our free 2-minute quiz. Tell us your capital, experience, and goals; we surface the brands worth researching. When you've narrowed your list, our full FDD reports are $49.
Take the free quiz Curious what you get? See a sample report →
Get this comparison as a spreadsheet.
We'll email you the full comparison spreadsheet: every brand in this category with its Item 7 investment range and royalty, side by side. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
✓ Check your inbox
The comparison spreadsheet is on its way.
The only franchise report written entirely for the buyer. 12 sections covering financial risks, legal obligations, and a personalized recommendation.
Browse Franchise Library See a real sample report →
$49 per brand · $99 for a 3-brand pack
is in-n-out a franchisein-n-out franchise costburger franchiseFive Guys franchiseFreddys Frozen CustardFood & Beverage franchiseitem 19
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.
No. In-N-Out has never sold franchises and files no franchise disclosure document, so there is no franchise fee, no Item 7 investment range, and no application process for a prospective owner. Every restaurant is owned and operated by the company. Any website quoting an In-N-Out franchise cost is describing a different brand or inventing the figure.
The company ties restaurant growth to its own production and distribution network rather than to outside capital, so it can only open where its supply chain already reaches. Franchising would also hand day-to-day hiring, wage, and operating decisions to independent owners. In-N-Out has kept those decisions in house since 1948, trading the faster growth and fee income franchising provides for control over the model.
In-N-Out has operated in California since 1948 and expanded across the western states and into Texas over the following decades. Tennessee is the first move east of that footprint: four restaurants were open as of April 2026, in Lebanon, Antioch, Murfreesboro, and Franklin, with up to 35 signaled for the state and $125.5 million invested in an office in Franklin. Because every location is company-owned, the map grows only where the company's own distribution network reaches.
Freddy's, Five Guys, and Smashburger all franchise and all file FDDs. Freddy's 2026 document lists a $35,000 license fee, $854,834 to $2,802,000 of investment depending on build format, a 5% royalty, and a $1,820,745 median in annual gross receipts across 477 franchised restaurants. Five Guys lists a $25,000 franchise fee plus a $50,000 development fee per restaurant, $977,850 to $1,375,750 of investment, a 6% royalty, and no earnings disclosure. Smashburger lists a $40,000 fee and $1,239,500 to $2,255,500, against a system that shrank from 217 to 172 restaurants over three years.
This page is part of VetMyFranchise. View all pages: llms.txt · llms-full.txt