About the Dossier

The Franchise Dossier is an independent research desk with one job: read Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDDs) and translate what they actually say into plain English, so a prospective owner can see the real costs and earnings before signing a 10-year agreement.

Why this exists

Franchise information online is dominated by two kinds of pages: the franchisor's own recruiting site, and lead-generation portals paid to hand your contact details to a sales team. Both are optimized to get you to inquire — not to tell you that a brand hides its Item 19 earnings, charges percentage rent on top of royalties, or takes a share of your gross profit rather than a flat fee.

We are none of those things. We don't recruit for any brand and we don't sell franchises. We read the disclosure document — the one filed with state regulators under the FTC Franchise Rule — and report the numbers with the fine print attached.

What we publish

• Franchise files — per-brand breakdowns of the initial franchise fee (Item 5), estimated initial investment (Item 7), royalty and ad-fund fees (Item 6), disclosed unit revenue (Item 19), and outlet counts (Item 20), each cited to the document.
• The directory — the same figures across brands, sortable, so you can compare on the numbers.
• Analysis — the decisions behind the numbers: is a franchise worth it, how to finance one, and what a given brand's FDD conveniently leaves out.

Independence and how we're funded

Our analysis is editorially independent. We may add clearly-labeled links to vetted partners — for example franchise-financing lenders or accredited franchise consultants — and if we do, those links will be disclosed and will never change what our analysis says about a brand. Our read of a brand's FDD is the same whether or not a partner relationship exists.

Questions or a correction to a figure? Contact us — we take accuracy seriously and update files when the underlying FDD changes.