A McDonald's franchisee does not just pay a brand fee. It pays a fee, rent, and an advertising contribution. This structure is not an accounting detail: it determines what happens when a restaurant stops being profitable.
What the official document says
In the United States, McDonald's publishes a document for franchise candidates, Your Path to Becoming a McDonald's Franchisee. It states, unambiguously:
- term of the agreement: “typically 20 years”;
- initial fee: 45,000 dollars; minimum cash down payment of 25% of the purchase price of the restaurant;
- monthly service fee: “a percentage of the restaurant's gross sales (currently 4%)”;
- monthly rent: “typically a fixed base rent and a percentage of the restaurant's gross sales”;
- advertising: “not less than 4% of gross sales”.
McDonald's does not put a figure on the rent component. The ranges in circulation (8 to 15% of turnover) come from third-party websites specialising in franchising, not from the company. They are not presented here as established. One also reads, on franchise brokerage websites, of an “operating fee of 20%”: this figure has no basis in the official documents and probably aggregates fee, rent and advertising.
The real-estate lever, claimed in the annual report
The idea goes back to Harry J. Sonneborn, who joined Ray Kroc in 1956 and proposed that the company own the real estate of its restaurants rather than merely collect fees. A company was set up for this purpose, Franchise Realty Corporation, of which Sonneborn was the first president; he became McDonald's first president and chief executive in 1959, before resigning in 1967.
Seventy years later, this strategy is still openly claimed. The Form 10-K of McDonald's Corporation for the 2025 financial year, filed with the SEC on 24 February 2026, puts it as follows:
“Under the conventional franchise arrangement, the Company generally owns the land and building or secures a long-term lease for the restaurant location, and the franchisee pays for equipment, signs, seating and décor. The Company believes that ownership of real estate, combined with the co-investment by franchisees, enables it to achieve restaurant performance levels that are among the highest in the industry.”McDonald's Corporation, Form 10-K, 2025 financial year (originally in English)
The 2025 figures
| Indicator | 31 December 2025 | 31 December 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurants worldwide | 45 356 | 43 477 |
| of which franchised | 43,317, i.e. about 95% | 41 432 |
| Company-operated restaurants | 2 039 | 2 045 |
| Sales across the whole network (systemwide sales) | $129,675M | $120,933M |
| Revenues recognised by McDonald's Corporation | $26,885M | $25,920M |
| of which revenues from franchised restaurants | $16,548M | $15,715M |
| of which sales by company-operated restaurants | $9,690M | $9,782M |
The figures above are those of the detailed tables in the 2025 10-K. The summary page of the same document, however, announces systemwide sales “of 139.4 billion dollars”, an amount that cannot be reconciled with the table ($129,675M) or with the 7% growth it itself indicates. We use the table.
The gap between the 129.7 billion dollars of systemwide sales and the 26.9 billion of recognised revenues sums up the model: McDonald's does not collect the restaurants' turnover, it takes a share of it - in the form of fees and rent. The 10-K puts it this way: conventional franchisees contribute to the company's revenues “primarily through the payment of rent and royalties based upon a percent of sales, with specified minimum rent payments”, plus initial fees. And it adds that this “heavily franchised” model is “designed to generate stable and predictable revenue”.
The segment that includes France is 89% franchised. In France itself, McDonald's claims about 1,589 restaurants and more than 76,000 employees under the brand; the company publishes neither its French turnover nor its number of franchisees.
Why this matters in a dispute
A franchisee whose restaurant becomes loss-making does not thereby cease to owe the minimum rent and the fee: these sums are based on turnover, not on profit. It is the mechanism of which the Antibes case file bears the trace, restaurant by restaurant: Bernard Collorafi's letters on the fees in the face of falling turnover, those on unpaid rent and cash flow, and the court-ordered expert report commissioned by the Paris Court of Appeal, which focused precisely on profitability and fees.
Finally, since the question of territorial protection runs through the case file: the McDonald's agreement does not carry territorial exclusivity, as a letter from the company to its franchisee in 1997 points out. The twenty-year term of the agreement had already been described in 1996 by Franchise Magazine.