Most profitable franchises

Nobody publishes a list of which franchises make their owners the most money, because franchisors aren’t required to say. What many do publish is what their locations sell in a year: an average, a median or both, for a stated group of locations. Those are the figures on this page. Each one is the brand’s own, for the group it chose to report, usually locations open the whole year.

Sales are the closest thing to a fair comparison across brands, but they aren’t what an owner keeps. Rent, payroll, food or supplies, royalties and loan payments all come out first, and those costs differ hugely by business. Read a high sales figure as a sign of a busy location, then use the brand’s own filing and its owners to work out the margin.

Franchises with the highest sales per location

Vital Care reports the highest figure, $17.2M a location for 2025. Among restaurants, Chick-fil-A leads at $9.16M a year for 2,302 restaurants outside malls, more than double most fast-food chains. McDonald’s reports $3.96M for its franchised restaurants, and Culver’s $4.14M. The list also includes businesses that don’t look like big earners from the street, such as facility cleaning, staffing and home-care brands, whose sales include the wages of the people they place or the subcontractors they pay.

The average where a brand gives one, otherwise its median. Groups of fewer than 5 locations aren’t ranked, nor are figures per franchise owner or territory (71 brands) or for company-run locations only (28).

Sales compared with the cost to open

A $17.2M restaurant that costs several million dollars to build isn’t necessarily a better buy than a $500K service business that costs $100K to start. Dividing yearly sales by the midpoint of the cost to open gives a rough sense of how hard the money works: the typical brand here sells about 1.7× its opening cost each year.

Premier Pools & Spas / Pinnacle Pools & Spas leads at 44×. High multiples belong almost entirely to businesses that need little equipment and no storefront, where most of each sale pays for labor or materials. A high multiple is a good sign that the business can pay back its opening cost, but a thin margin can still leave little for the owner, so check what the brand says about costs before reading too much into it.

Brands that publish a profit figure

A handful of brands go further and publish a profit-type figure for the same locations: EBITDA, operating profit or net income. Each leaves out different costs, so compare them only with care, and read the definition on the brand’s page. The highest is Slick City’s $1.35M (Profit Before Excluded Expenses).

Sales per location by industry

The typical restaurant brand here sells $1.35M a location, against $680K for home service brands. The table gives the median across each industry’s brands with a ranked figure, and the brand with the highest figure.

Highest sales among franchises under $250K

These brands have a cost to open starting at $250K or less and still report some of the highest sales per location. Most are service businesses run from an office or a van.

Reading a franchise’s sales figures

Every figure here covers the group of locations the brand chose to report, and the choice matters. Most report locations open the whole year, which leaves out new openings that are still building up. Some report only their best formats, such as free-standing restaurants with a drive-thru, and some report only locations the company runs itself. The group is named on each brand’s page.

Before relying on any figure, ask the franchisor how many locations in the group sold more than the average, how long they had been open, and what owners in your area see. Then build your own estimate with the cost calculator, and compare a short list side by side with the compare tool, which now shows each brand’s sales and profit figures.

825 brands on this site publish some figures and the others list none. For those, the best franchises to own ranking uses growth, closures and other tests instead.