Mostly no. Panda Express keeps 2,423 restaurants company-owned and licenses 184 in captive venues. Item 19 shows a $4,157,008 airport average.
Quick answer Mostly no. Panda Express keeps 2,423 of its 2,607 restaurants company-owned and licenses only 184, all inside captive venues like airports, military bases, universities and casinos. Citadel Panda Express, Inc. does file a real FDD: a $25,000 license fee, an 8% royalty, and $514,500 to $3,275,500 to open one.
Twenty-three licensed Panda Express restaurants operated inside US airports during fiscal 2025, and they averaged $4,157,008 in gross sales. The median airport unit did $4,064,585 and the strongest did $10,748,193. Those figures come from Item 19 of the Citadel Panda Express, Inc. Franchise Disclosure Document dated April 17, 2026.
Is Panda Express a franchise? For 184 of its restaurants, yes. For the other 2,423, no. Item 20 counts 2,607 Panda Express restaurants at the close of fiscal 2025, of which 2,423 are owned and operated by affiliate Panda Express, Inc. and 184 are licensed to outside operators. That works out to a 7% licensed share, and every one of those 184 sits in what the document calls a captive venue.
So there is something to buy. Just not the thing most people searching this question have in mind.
Citadel Panda Express, Inc. was incorporated in California on October 25, 1990. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Panda Express, Inc., which is itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Panda Restaurant Group, Inc. PRG owns the marks and the operating system, licenses them to Citadel, and Citadel sublicenses them to you.
Item 1 says Citadel has never conducted a business of the type you would operate. It is a licensing vehicle. The restaurants belong to its parent: PEI owned and operated 2,423 Panda Express restaurants as of December 27, 2025.
That puts your franchisor’s parent in the position of your largest competitor, and Item 12 does not soften it. You get no protected or reserved territory and no right of first refusal on any additional location. Panda and its affiliates can authorize a restaurant anywhere they choose.
The first Panda Express opened in Glendale, California in 1983. Citadel has registered offerings in various states since 1995 and moved to the current style of license agreement in 2004, so none of this is a recent pivot.
Item 1 says most restaurants operated under a license agreement will sit in captive venues such as military facilities, airports, campuses, hospitals and universities. Then comes the sentence that decides who qualifies: licensee applicants sometimes have a management arrangement, called a Client contract, with the owner or lessor of the venue.
That is the gate. The buyer this program is built for already holds the airport terminal concession or the campus dining contract. Panda is placing a brand into real estate somebody else controls, and the operator who brings the real estate is the one who gets the license.
Item 7 confirms the format: a typical captive-venue Panda Express runs roughly 500 to 1,500 square feet, with a few near 3,000. This is a food court counter, not a building.
Pull the full Citadel Panda Express data sheet
The fiscal 2025 table covers 167 licensed restaurants open at least 52 weeks between December 29, 2024 and December 27, 2025.
| Venue type | Units | Average gross sales | Median gross sales | Lowest unit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Airport | 23 | $4,157,008 | $4,064,585 | $1,799,101 |
| Travel plaza | 8 | $2,472,180 | $2,278,489 | $1,693,924 |
| Casino | 4 | $1,999,832 | $1,881,242 | $1,218,729 |
| Military | 55 | $1,651,329 | $1,550,464 | $343,737 |
| University | 74 | $952,354 | $877,833 | $216,661 |
| Hospital | 3 | $624,396 | $539,339 | $503,688 |
| All venues | 167 | $1,715,919 | $1,328,594 | $216,661 |
The 167 restaurants generated $286,558,411 combined, 38% of them beat the systemwide average, and their average age was 7.27 years. This is a mature sample, not a ramp-up story.
Anyone quoting one Panda Express number is quoting the wrong one. The $1,328,594 systemwide median blends airport units past $4 million with university units under $900,000. The venue you sign sets your range before you hire anyone.
Two footnotes deserve a second read. Fifty-nine of the 167 restaurants are licensed to joint ventures in which a Panda affiliate holds a minority stake, so more than a third of the sample has a Panda affiliate on the ownership side. The table also excludes 11 licensed restaurants that operated less than a full year in 2025 after having been open more than a year, which is how an FDD describes units that closed.
Item 19 reports gross sales and nothing else. No cost of sales, no labor, no occupancy, no profit figure. Item 7 notes that leases in these venues frequently carry percentage rent, typically 10% above a sales threshold, and that food court common area charges run 35% to 50% of minimum rent. Those are what turn $4.1 million into whatever an airport operator actually earns, and the FDD does not print them.
| Item 7 line | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| Initial license fee | $25,000 | $25,000 |
| Lease of premises, 3 months | $10,000 | $425,000 |
| Leasehold improvements | $100,000 | $1,500,000 |
| Furniture, fixtures, equipment, supplies | $120,000 | $650,000 |
| Insurance, annual premium | $94,500 | $157,500 |
| Payroll and related taxes | $39,000 | $65,000 |
| Additional funds, 3 months | $18,000 | $30,000 |
| Total | $514,500 | $3,275,500 |
Note 3 says airport rent may be significantly higher than other venues and accounts for the high end of that lease line. The venue producing a $4.1 million average is the one charging $425,000 for three months of space.
Insurance is no rounding error at $94,500 to $157,500 a year, which follows from requirements including $10,000,000 of general liability per occurrence and $10,000,000 of cyber coverage. A pilot program also allows a freestanding licensed restaurant with a drive-thru at roughly 2,600 square feet, which raises the estimated total by up to $1,500,000.
The $25,000 license fee is the published figure. Item 5 discloses that fees actually received in the US during 2025 ranged from $12,500 to $25,000, the lower amount negotiated by multi-restaurant licensees adding units under older, shorter-term agreements.
Royalty is 8% of gross sales, subject to a $4,000 monthly minimum per restaurant that Panda can raise annually with CPI. On a university unit at the $877,833 median, 8% is about $70,000 a year. Initial training carries no fee. A transfer costs $10,000 per restaurant, capped at $30,000 per transaction, and a successor term another $10,000. If you fail to cure an operating default and Panda elects to run the restaurant, its management fee is 7% of gross volume plus costs.
Now the absences. There is no advertising fund. Item 11 states that Citadel has no formal advertising program and no franchisee advertising council, that licensees are not currently required to contribute to any marketing fund, and that the agreement grants no right to participate in one. Licensees buy promotional materials from Panda’s marketing department at $300 to $1,000 a year and otherwise ride campaigns run for all Panda Express restaurants.
That reads as a saving and behaves like a dependency. You get national brand spend you do not pay for and cannot influence, set by the company operating 2,423 competing restaurants. The other absence is territory, which stings less inside a captive venue than it would on a corner but is still nothing on paper.
| Year end | Licensed | Company |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 165 | 2,248 |
| 2024 | 173 | 2,329 |
| 2025 | 184 | 2,423 |
Licensed units grew by 11 in 2025 with zero terminations, non-renewals, reacquisitions or closures. Table 4 also shows PEI sold 5 of its own restaurants to licensees in 2025 and 6 in 2024, so part of that licensed growth is conversion rather than new construction.
Table 5 is blunter. As of December 27, 2025 there were 4 signed license agreements for restaurants not yet open, and Panda projected 10 new licensed restaurants against 132 new company restaurants for 2026. The corporate side plans to grow roughly thirteen times faster than the licensed side. Whatever this program is, it is not the growth engine.
Item 3 is worth a last read. The FDD discloses 16 pending matters, all of them brought against PEI and PRG by employees, guests and patent holders, and not one is a licensee suing the franchisor. A base of 184 sophisticated operators producing no disclosed disputes says as much about who gets these licenses as about how they are treated.
You cannot have one, and the 2026 projections say that will not change. The nearest analogue is the non-traditional format at Qdoba, which sells the same captive-venue idea to a wider set of buyers: a $20,000 franchise fee, a 6% royalty, and $234,500 to $898,000 of estimated initial investment under the 12/25 FDD. Its Item 19 draws on 464 franchised restaurants and excludes every non-traditional unit.
The wider category sits in our best Mexican food franchises breakdown, and the same ownership question for the largest fast-casual chain runs through is Chipotle a franchise.
VetMyFranchise reads Items 5, 7 and 19 out of the filed document rather than a brand’s opportunity page. Read the Citadel Panda Express FDD analysis before you take anyone’s word for what this license costs.
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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.
Only for a captive venue location, and only with Panda's written authorization for that specific site. Citadel Panda Express, Inc. licenses restaurants inside airports, military facilities, universities, hospitals, casinos and travel plazas, and Item 1 notes that applicants sometimes already hold a management arrangement with the venue owner. There is no offering for a standalone Panda Express on a street corner, and the license agreement does not obligate the franchisor to authorize any site you propose.
The April 2026 FDD estimates $514,500 to $3,275,500 for a single restaurant, including a $25,000 initial license fee. The spread is mostly rent and construction. Three months of rent ranges from $10,000 to $425,000 because airport space prices nothing like a campus food court, and leasehold improvements run $100,000 to $1,500,000. A pilot freestanding format with a drive-thru adds up to $1,500,000 on top of the table.
Item 19 reports gross sales only, with a $1,328,594 median across 167 licensed captive-venue restaurants in fiscal 2025. Venue type drives almost all of the variance: airports averaged $4,157,008 while universities averaged $952,354. The document discloses no cost of sales, no operating expenses and no profit figure, so none of those numbers describe what an operator keeps.
Panda has not published a rationale we can quote, so read the behavior instead. Affiliate Panda Express, Inc. opened 99 company restaurants in 2025 and projects 132 more for 2026, against 10 projected licensed openings, and the licensed restaurants sit almost entirely in venues a corporate operator cannot easily contract into. Licensing looks like an access tool for closed real estate rather than a growth channel.
No. Item 12 states that you receive no protected or reserved territory and no option or right of first refusal on any additional location. Panda and its affiliates can authorize a restaurant anywhere, including next to yours, and can sell through other channels of distribution under the same marks. Inside a captive venue that matters less than it would on a corner, because the venue contract is the real barrier to entry, but the agreement gives you nothing on paper.
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