FranPicks rankings
Best franchises, by the numbers
Six ways to sort the same FDD-sourced data behind every brand page. No franchisor pays for a spot on any of these lists; a brand ranks because its filed numbers put it there.
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Best franchises under $150k
Total investment tops out at $150,000 or less, at the low end of the Item 7 range.
Lowest-cost franchises
Every brand, ranked by the smallest total investment first.
Best food franchises
QSR and coffee/dessert brands, cheapest to open first.
Best fitness franchises
Gyms and studios, cheapest to open first.
Lowest-royalty franchises
The ongoing cut of revenue that runs for the life of the agreement.
Highest disclosed revenue
Only brands that publish an Item 19 average-unit-revenue figure.
Which list should you actually use?
"Best" means nothing until you say best for what. A brand that tops the lowest-cost list can sit near the bottom on royalty, and the cheapest door to open is not always the one that clears the most at the end of the year. The six lists exist because there are six different questions, and the honest answer to yours depends on which number binds you hardest.
If your ceiling is a fixed pile of cash, start with under $150k or the full lowest-cost ranking, then run the affordability estimator to see which of those you actually clear on liquid capital and net worth, the two gates a franchisor checks before it checks anything else.
If you can afford the buy-in and you're thinking about the decade after it, weight the royalty more heavily than the sticker price. A royalty is a percentage of gross revenue, forever, so a two-point difference compounds into far more money than most people save by picking a cheaper build-out. And before you trust any earnings claim, check the disclosed-revenue list, which only includes brands that actually publish an Item 19. The ones that don't aren't necessarily worse; they've just chosen to tell you nothing, and a projection with no filing behind it is a sales pitch.
How the rankings are built
There is no editor's thumb on these lists. Each one is a query against the same figures published on the individual brand pages, sorted by a single disclosed number, total investment, royalty percentage, or Item 19 revenue. Add a brand to the dataset and it slots into every relevant ranking on the next build; nothing is hand-placed, promoted, or held back. When two brands tie on the sort number, they fall back to alphabetical, not to whoever we'd rather feature. That's the whole point: the order is a property of the filings, and you can reproduce it yourself from the numbers on each page.