Before you buy the franchise, check the numbers.
Franchisors hire teams of lawyers to write 300-page FDDs. We break down the real numbers — actual franchisee churn, ongoing lawsuits, and the fees you pay forever — benchmarked against 2,947 brands.
Every brand page is free. The franchisor's own filing tells you a royalty is 7% — it won't tell you that's high for the category, that the network shrank last year, or that half its peers disclose earnings and this one doesn't.
Four things the corpus says that no single FDD can
Those are free, and so is the rest of the statistics page and the open dataset behind it. We publish the market-level numbers because they're the proof that the per-brand read is worth something.
The list of owners you're allowed to call is chosen for you
Every franchisor hands a serious buyer a list of current franchisees to phone as references — and every franchisor decides who's on it. It will not include the owners who quit, sold at a loss, or were terminated last year. Those people are still in the FDD: Item 20 reports the closures, terminations, non-renewals and transfers by count, whether or not anyone points you at them. Across our corpus the median brand closes 3.6% of its franchised outlets in a year (1,411 brands with clean Item 20 tables) — so the useful question isn't whether a brand had closures, it's whether it had more than its category normally does.
What the sales deck shows you, and what the filing shows
| In the discovery-day pitch | In the registered FDD |
|---|---|
| Top-performing locations and hand-picked owner testimonials | Item 19 — the earnings the franchisor is willing to put on paper, if any. 1,237 brands put none. |
| "We're growing fast" | Item 20 — outlets opened, closed, terminated, not renewed and transferred, by year. 25% of systems shrank. |
| "The franchise fee is $45,000" | Items 5, 6 and 7 — the fee, the royalty and ad fund you pay forever, and the total it actually takes to open the doors. |
| "We have a great relationship with our owners" | Item 3 — every material proceeding, including the ones franchisees filed against the franchisor. |
None of that is hidden. It's public, it's free, and it's 300 pages of it per brand. The work isn't finding the numbers — it's knowing what they mean.
An AI can read one FDD. It can't rank it.
Paste the document into a chatbot and you'll get an accurate summary of that document. What no summary can tell you is whether a 7% royalty is high for the category, whether this brand's closure rate is double its peers', or whether two brands on your shortlist are filed by the same franchisor. Those answers need the other 2,946 filings in the room.
So here's one, on a real brand
| Total investment | $722K | Bottom quartile for fitness |
| Royalty | 8% | Bottom quartile for fitness |
| Avg unit revenue (Item 19) | $987,810 | Above the fitness median |
| Closure rate | 0.3% | Top quartile for fitness |
| System size | 1,179 | Top quartile for fitness |
Every figure read from Club Pilates's own registered FDD and ranked against 2,946 other filings. The full report adds the litigation split, the Item 20 churn detail, and the questions to put to the franchisor — see the free page.
One brand. Five things you can't get from the filing alone:
- Earnings disclosed in Item 19 — with the category ranking
- Total investment and every recurring fee — with peer comparison
- Closures, terminations and transfers — benchmarked against the category
- Franchisee litigation separated from other corporate cases
- Questions to ask the franchisor based on what this filing actually shows
Instant delivery · No subscription · 14-day refund
We don't sell franchises
Franchise Facts Report is an independent data publisher. We don't represent franchisors, we don't sell your details to franchise brokers or development agents, and we earn exactly the same $99 whether you buy the franchise or walk away from it. Any paid sponsorship is clearly labelled and never changes a ranking, risk read or report — the methodology sets out the full policy, and exactly what we machine-read and what we refuse to assert.
Start with a brand
Search all 2,947 brands → · or browse by category, ranking, or head-to-head comparison.