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 3,018 brands.
Every brand page is free, every figure on it. 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 3.2% of its franchised outlets in a year (1,446 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. 1,349 brands put none. |
| "We're growing fast" | Item 20 — outlets opened, closed, terminated, not renewed and transferred, by year. 24% 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 3,017 filings in the room.
So here's one, on a real brand
| Total investment | $612K | Bottom quartile for other |
| Royalty | 8% | Bottom quartile for other |
| Closure rate | 0.6% | Below the other median |
| System size | 1,029 | Top quartile for other |
Every figure read from Club Pilates's own registered FDD and ranked against 3,017 other filings. The litigation split and the Item 20 churn detail are on the free Club Pilates page, like every other brand's.
Which franchise fits your budget?
Tell us your budget and the industries you're considering. We'll match you with 5–10 franchises whose own FDDs fit — ranked by earnings disclosure, growth and closure rate — and email you the list.
Franchises by budget
| Total investment | Brands that fit | Disclose Item 19 | Grew last year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Franchises under $50K | 334 | 140 | 134 |
| Franchises under $100K | 704 | 327 | 306 |
| Franchises under $150K | 1,031 | 535 | 462 |
| Franchises under $250K | 1,484 | 814 | 666 |
| Franchises under $500K | 2,026 | 1,133 | 870 |
We don't sell franchises
Franchise Facts Report is an independent data publisher. We don't represent franchisors, the data is free, and the shortlist ranks brands only on what their own FDDs disclose. Your details go to a franchise consultant only if you ask for one — consultants are paid by the franchisor, not by you. Any paid sponsorship is clearly labelled and never changes a ranking or risk read — the methodology sets out the full policy, and exactly what we machine-read and what we refuse to assert.
Start with a brand
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