1.75% → 24.75%
What you will really owe
Good Feet Store, The advertises the 1.75%. The same filing also requires a brand fund and local marketing — the widest gap of the 1,180 we have read.
What a franchise costs, and how its owners fared.
Franchisors must file a disclosure document before they can sell you anything. We read them, and set what they claim beside the repayment record of every franchisee who borrowed to buy in. Then you add your own rent, wages and borrowing, and a five-year model shows the profit, the cash flow, and the month you break even.
- Brands
- 1,426
- SBA loans read
- 93,493
- Filings a machine has read
- 1,180
- Brands that disclose average revenue
- 444
What happened to the people who bought a franchise
The SBA publishes what became of every franchise loan, brand by brand — the only public record of how franchisees actually did. It shows that the brand you pick matters far more than the fact that it is a franchise. Every loan approved between 2010 and 2026.
- Franchisees who borrowed
- 93,493
- Loans that have run their course
- 45,407
- Ended in the debt being written off
- 4,432
- Outcomes the SBA withholds
- 35,640
- Cancelled, or still running
- 12,446
9.8% of the loans we can see ended with the debt written off — 4,432 businesses that closed owing money.
44% of outcomes are withheld from the public file. We do not estimate them or drop them from the denominator: a brand’s rate appears only where enough loans have finished to mean something, always with the number it is out of.
At 69 of these brands every borrower repaid. At 49, more than one in four did not.
Same investment, same word on the door. Which brand you pick changes your odds more than anything else about franchising.
Every brand here shows how many franchisees borrowed and how many repaid. Looking one up is free. Find the brand you are considering →
Four things you will know before you sign
From the franchisor’s own filing or the federal loan record — not our opinion, and not on the brochure.
960
How the owners before you fared
960 brands carry the federal loan record; 415 have enough finished loans to rate. Those rates run from none to more than one in four.
444
Whether it works at your costs
444 brands state a revenue figure solid enough to build on. Add your rent, wages and financing — every assumption labelled with whose it is.
9.00%
How two brands actually compare
Half of all brands take more than this. Set two side by side and the gap shows in dollars, beside their loan outcomes.
What we refuse to guess
Franchise listing sites publish what franchisors send them. This reads the filings themselves and the federal loan record — and tells you what is missing from both.
774 → 444
Other sites ask whether a brand discloses earnings. We ask what it disclosed.
774 brands make an earnings claim. Only 444 state a figure you can divide into an investment. The rest are ranges and medians.
44%
of the outcome record is withheld, and we say so
No outcome is published for 35,640 loans, against 45,407 that are. Every rate in this market is computed over the remainder; ours says which.
20
finished loans before we print a rate
Two failures in four is 50% — and also four people. McDonald’s has six finished loans and none charged off: a perfect record, and no evidence. Its page says so.
0
invented numbers, and no composite score
A field the franchisor left out stays empty. One score would blend loan outcomes with filing terms, and only 966 of 1,426 brands have both.
The same 966 brands, asked three questions
- 774 of 966make an Item 19 financial performance representation
The disclosure exists. Most listing sites stop here.
- 446 of 966state a per-outlet revenue figure in dollars
The others report enrolment counts, or a seasonal service line — real numbers that are not revenue per outlet.
- 444 of 966state one whose population is unambiguous
The rest average across territories rather than outlets, mix in affiliate-owned locations, or quote a mean over a distribution most outlets fall below.
Looking up a brand is free, and so is the record behind it — the loan outcomes in full, the fee to start, what it costs to open, how many outlets there are. What $199 opens is the reading: everything you will owe them each year once every line of Item 6 is counted, what an outlet actually takes, the terms worth raising before you sign, and a five-year model you can put your own numbers through.