What a franchise actually costs

Every U.S. franchise brand in the FranchiseLens corpus, compared on the two numbers that decide affordability: what it takes to open, and what you owe every year you operate.

What this does not tell you. Franchise disclosure documents publish costs, not earnings — there is no revenue data here. So this page ranks nothing by profit, ROI or payback, because the data cannot support those claims. It answers the cost half of the question, precisely.

Total investment, spread across the matching brands

Brands

Brand names link to that brand's full page — every figure there is cited to its page in the source document. The bar spans each brand's disclosed low-to-high investment range; the dot marks the midpoint. The axis is logarithmic — costs run from $2.5K to $126M — so a bar's length reads directly as its spread multiple. A long bar means the franchisor is not committing to what a unit actually costs.