The Big Number in Franchising
There's a version of the American economy that rarely makes headlines, and it's worth $550 billion.
That's what franchise establishments generated in GDP in 2024, according to Oxford Economics' latest report for the International Franchise Association Foundation. Alongside that figure, franchises supported nearly 8.8 million jobs, which works out to 5.5% of total U.S. employment. To put that in perspective, that's roughly the economic output of the entire Philadelphia metro area, generated not by a handful of mega-corporations but by hundreds of thousands of individual owner-operators across the country.
Franchising works, at its core, because it solves a problem that has plagued businesses since Benjamin Franklin franchised a printing shop in 1731: how do you align the incentives of the person running the day-to-day operation with the interests of the brand behind it. The answer is ownership. Franchisees aren't hired managers collecting a salary, they're investors and CEOs with skin in the game, and that's exactly why the model has scaled for nearly 300 years.
If you're still picturing franchising as a handful of national chains slinging burgers, it's time to update the mental model. This is a $550 billion engine, and it's running on local ownership.
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The Big Number in Franchising
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