US restaurant chain rankings, 2024
The 10 largest US restaurant chains generate $210B in sales. The other $890B is in the long tail.
For POS, distribution, payroll, loyalty, and delivery teams selling into restaurants. The Top 10 already have a procurement team. The 200,000 operators behind them do not.
The market, in three numbers
A 10-brand top of mind. A 200,000-operator tail.
US restaurant sales in 2024
National Restaurant Association projection. Foodservice is the second-largest private-sector employer in the US, with about 15.7 million workers across roughly 749,000 locations.
share held by the Top 10
$210B of $1.1T. The Top 500 chains as a group hold around 33 percent. The remaining two thirds, roughly $740B, belongs to independents and small multi-unit operators.
US units at the largest by unit count
Subway leads on US unit count. By sales it ranks eighth, behind McDonald's, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, Wendy's, Dunkin', and Burger King. Unit count and revenue do not move together.
Sources: National Restaurant Association, 2024 State of the Restaurant Industry; Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report, 2024.
The ranking
The 10 largest restaurant chains in the US, by 2024 sales.
Ranked by US system-wide sales. Fast food and fast casual dominate. Nine of the ten brands sell a meal at the drive-thru, the counter, or the app. Chick-fil-A turns under 3,100 stores into more revenue than Wendy's, Dunkin', Burger King, Subway, Domino's, and Chipotle do with their full unit counts.
| # | Chain | Parent company | US sales (2024) | US locations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | McDonald's | McDonald's Corp (NYSE: MCD) | ~$53.0B | ~13,500 |
| 2 | Starbucks | Starbucks Corp (NASDAQ: SBUX) | ~$31.0B | ~16,800 |
| 3 | Chick-fil-A | Chick-fil-A Inc (private) | ~$22.0B | ~3,100 |
| 4 | Taco Bell | Yum Brands (NYSE: YUM) | ~$15.0B | ~7,400 |
| 5 | Wendy's | The Wendy's Company (NASDAQ: WEN) | ~$12.0B | ~6,000 |
| 6 | Dunkin' | Inspire Brands (private equity, Roark) | ~$11.5B | ~9,400 |
| 7 | Burger King | Restaurant Brands Intl (NYSE: QSR) | ~$10.3B | ~7,000 |
| 8 | Subway | Roark Capital (private equity) | ~$10.0B | ~20,000 |
| 9 | Domino's | Domino's Pizza Inc (NYSE: DPZ) | ~$9.2B | ~6,800 |
| 10 | Chipotle Mexican Grill | Chipotle Mexican Grill (NYSE: CMG) | ~$9.0B | ~3,500 |
Figures marked "~" are 2024 US system-wide sales, drawn from Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report 2024, cross-checked against each operator's most recent annual report and Nation's Restaurant News reporting. System-wide sales include franchisee revenue, not just company-operated. Combined Top 10 total rounds to approximately 210 billion dollars.
The long tail
Two thirds of the US restaurant dollar belongs to operators most vendors never name.
The Top 10 generates 19 percent of US restaurant sales. The Top 500 chains together generate around 33 percent. That leaves about 67 percent, roughly 740 billion dollars a year, with independents and small multi-unit operators. For a vendor selling POS, payroll, loyalty, online ordering, or any kind of operational software, the long tail is not the consolation prize. It is the prize.
The Census County Business Patterns puts US restaurant locations at around 749,000. Take out the Top 500 chain footprint, somewhere near 150,000 units, and you are left with roughly 600,000 independent and small-chain locations. Most of them are owned by an operator running between one and ten units. That operator is the buyer, signs the contract, and makes the decision in the next sales meeting, not the next budget cycle. The procurement department does not exist because the procurement department is the same person who picks the produce supplier and approves the schedule.
This is the structural fact that vendor data tools get wrong. Most enterprise databases group restaurants by brand. Search "Subway" and you get one row with 20,000 locations. The reality is that those 20,000 stores belong to several thousand different franchisee LLCs, each of which is a separate buyer for your software. The brand is one customer. The franchisee universe is several thousand. Same problem with Domino's, Dunkin', Burger King, and Taco Bell. The brand on the door is the supply contract. The operator is the buyer.
Methodology
Why our ranking moves and the published lists do not.
The Top 10 list above is steady. The interesting movement is not at the top. It is at units 100 through 500, where new fast-casual entrants and regional chains move 10 to 30 ranks per year, and across the long tail of independents where openings and closings churn at around 14 percent annually.
How we build the picture
- Anchor on the public reporting. Technomic's Top 500 is the canonical sales ranking. NRA's State of the Restaurant Industry is the canonical market total. We use both at the top, and cite them so the working is checkable.
- Cross-check against filings. McDonald's, Starbucks, Yum, Restaurant Brands, Wendy's, Domino's, and Chipotle file public US segment data. Chick-fil-A and the private-equity holdings disclose enough in trade press and franchise disclosure documents to triangulate. We do not invent numbers.
- Resolve units to operating businesses. The chain count is brand. The buyer count is the franchisee LLC. We map every multi-unit operator back to the legal entity that holds the franchise agreement and runs payroll for the staff.
- Build the long-tail universe separately. Independent restaurants are sourced site by site against the broader US small business map, with the named owner, a verified email, and a direct dial. Each record is refreshed on a rolling schedule, not republished once a year.
- Drop the dead pins. Restaurant closures run high. The annual rankings carry yesterday's footprint for a year. We do not.
If you want the source breakdown for a specific chain or city, ask. We do not hide the working.
By state
Where the largest chains are densest.
The five largest states carry roughly 38 percent of the US restaurant universe. Per capita, the picture flips toward tourist economies and dense urban markets, where states like Nevada and New York concentrate more restaurants per resident than the population leaders.
| # | State | Restaurants | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 90,300 | 230 |
| 2 | Texas | 62,100 | 202 |
| 3 | Florida | 52,400 | 228 |
| 4 | New York | 46,800 | 237 |
| 5 | Illinois | 28,500 | 228 |
| 6 | Pennsylvania | 27,900 | 215 |
| 7 | Ohio | 25,600 | 217 |
| 8 | Georgia | 22,800 | 205 |
| 9 | North Carolina | 21,400 | 199 |
| 10 | Michigan | 19,200 | 192 |
| 11 | New Jersey | 18,700 | 202 |
| 12 | Virginia | 17,300 | 198 |
| 13 | Washington | 16,500 | 211 |
| 14 | Arizona | 15,200 | 203 |
| 15 | Massachusetts | 14,800 | 211 |
Counts rounded to the nearest hundred for display. The dataset itself is exact, down to the street address. Source: Orbital site-by-site map, April 2026, anchored on US Census CBP NAICS 722 and cross-checked against state licensing rolls. Per-capita math against US Census 2024 population estimates.
Our take
The Top 10 look unbeatable. Their unit growth is roughly zero.
We believe
If you sell into restaurants and your pipeline is built on the Top 10, you are buying flat growth at a premium price.
The Top 10 added under 1 percent to their US unit count in 2024. Several shrank. Subway closed several hundred US locations. Burger King closed lower-volume sites under its renewal plan. Starbucks slowed new openings. McDonald's grew, but in the low single digits. Per Nation's Restaurant News and Technomic, the dollar growth at the top is almost entirely price-driven, not traffic-driven, and not unit-driven.
Meanwhile, the chains ranked 200 to 500 grew unit counts by 6 to 12 percent. The fast-casual emerging brands grew faster. The independents, the half a million of them, churn at around 14 percent annually, which means around 100,000 new operating restaurants come online every year. That is 100,000 fresh buyers who need a POS, a payroll vendor, an online-ordering platform, a delivery integration, and a payment processor. A vendor team that wants double-digit growth in 2026 cannot get there inside the Top 10, because the Top 10 is not growing units. The growth is in the tail.
We watched a restaurant POS team work this for two quarters. Their old motion was a corporate-only sales cycle into the Top 50, with one named account executive per logo and 18-month sales cycles. They added a long-tail motion: 30,000 owner-verified independent restaurant operators per quarter, with the named decision-maker on every record, a direct email, and a direct dial. The independent motion closed three times as much net new ARR in the first quarter as the enterprise team did in the same period. The Top 10 list is the answer to a great trivia question. It is rarely the answer to the growth target.
Who buys this data
B2B vendors selling into US restaurants.
This page is for the teams selling into restaurants, not the restaurants themselves. The buyer for this dataset usually falls into one of these categories.
Restaurant POS and online ordering
Toast, Square, Olo, Block, and the cloud-POS challengers selling the upgrade off a 10-year-old terminal. The buyer is the independent operator or the multi-unit franchisee, not the corporate procurement office.
Foodservice distribution
Sysco, US Foods, and Performance Food Group account teams. New-account reps targeting independents and small multi-unit operators that fall outside the existing route book.
Commercial kitchen equipment
Hood, walk-in, fryer, and combi-oven manufacturers and distributors. The replacement cycle is 8 to 12 years. The decision sits with the owner-operator, not the brand.
Loyalty, CRM, and marketing
SMS, email, and loyalty platforms built for restaurant operators. Local SEO and reputation tools. The buyer is the operator with one to ten locations, not the 500-store chain.
Restaurant payroll, HR, and back-office
Restaurant365, Crunchtime, 7shifts, and the broader restaurant-vertical payroll stack. The buyer is the operator hitting the limits of generic payroll software.
Delivery and marketplace partnerships
DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub account managers running merchant acquisition into independent and small-chain operators. White-label delivery providers selling direct alternatives.
Adjacent pages from the same dataset: how many restaurants in the US, the broader by-industry email lists, and the full data library.
Plain-spoken
When the chain-restaurant angle is wrong.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You only sell into national chains. If your motion is one annual contract with McDonald's and one with Starbucks, you do not need 600,000 operator records. You need a head of foodservice and a head of franchise development. Save your budget.
You need consumer demand data. Average check, daypart traffic, market basket, foot traffic to restaurants by neighborhood: Placer.ai, NPD CREST, and the credit-card panels do that. We map operators, not the diners walking through the door.
You need real-time food cost or commodity pricing. USDA, the trading desks, and the foodservice purchasing platforms do that. We do not price chicken wings by week.
You are looking for inspection or licensing data. County health department violations, liquor licence status, and food handler certifications live with the states and counties. We do not stand those up here.
The honest version
Why most chain-restaurant vendor data is wrong.
Google "largest restaurant chains in the US" and the top results are usually Wikipedia, QSR magazine's annual list, or a Statista summary citing Technomic. All three are useful. None of them are operator-level. They give you the brand, the parent company, and the system-wide sales figure. They do not give you the franchisee, the multi-unit operator, the regional emerging-brand owner who runs four locations and is about to swap out the POS at all of them.
This is the data tools gap most enterprise vendors run into. Statista aggregates and lags by 12 to 18 months. IBISWorld does market sizing well but stops at the brand level. NRA publishes the canonical industry totals and the canonical macro picture. None of them surface the operator. None of them tell you which 40 franchisees of a top-10 brand are the buyers for your software next quarter, or which 200 independents in Phoenix grew from one to three units in the last 18 months and just hit the threshold where they need scheduling software.
This is exactly the gap Orbital was built for. We map the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, find the named operator of each one, and validate the contact before it reaches you. Nothing about that is restaurant-specific, which is why we can also map dentists, HVAC contractors, med spas, auto dealers, and accountants the same way. What is specific to restaurants is the layer on top: cuisine type, unit count band, franchise affiliation, delivery integration footprint, and whether the operator owns one location or twenty.
One more piece of context worth pricing in. The Top 10 list above changes by one or two positions every couple of years. The Top 500 list changes meaningfully every year. The independent operator universe changes every week. Roughly 14 percent of US restaurants turn over annually, around 100,000 net new operating businesses entering and exiting. For a vendor doing outbound this quarter, the question is which operators are open this Monday, which ones grew, and which decision-maker is on the phone. That is the gap a site-by-site, owner-by-owner map closes.
Questions
Before you ask sales about the chain-restaurant dataset.
What is the largest restaurant chain in the US?
McDonald's is the largest US restaurant chain by system-wide sales, at roughly 53 billion dollars across about 13,500 US locations in 2024. Starbucks ranks second at around 31 billion dollars, and Chick-fil-A third at about 22 billion dollars despite operating fewer than 3,100 stores, which gives it the highest per-unit sales in the top 10 by a wide margin.
How much do the top 10 US restaurant chains generate in sales?
The top 10 US chains generate roughly 210 billion dollars in combined US system-wide sales, against a total US restaurant market of about 1.1 trillion dollars per the National Restaurant Association. That works out to around 19 percent of the market in the hands of 10 brands. The Technomic Top 500 chains together hold about 33 percent. The rest, two thirds of the dollar pool, is independents and small multi-unit operators.
What are the top 10 restaurant chains in the US?
By 2024 US system-wide sales: McDonald's, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, Wendy's, Dunkin', Burger King, Subway, Domino's, and Chipotle Mexican Grill. Nine of the ten are fast-food or fast-casual concepts. The only full-service chain that comes close to the bottom of this list is Olive Garden, which sits in the low-single-digit billions and is outside the top 10 on this measure.
Which restaurant chain has the most US locations?
Subway operates the most US units, around 20,000 locations, though its US system-wide sales of about 10 billion dollars rank it eighth on revenue. Starbucks is second on unit count at roughly 16,800 US stores, followed by McDonald's at 13,500. Unit count and sales rank diverge widely because per-unit volumes range from under 500,000 dollars at Subway to over 9 million dollars at Chick-fil-A.
Are the largest restaurant chains growing or flat?
Mostly flat on units. Per Technomic and Nation's Restaurant News, the Top 10 grew US locations by under 1 percent in 2024, and several shrank. The dollar growth that exists is price-driven, not traffic-driven. The double-digit unit growth in 2024 sat with independent fast-casual concepts, ghost kitchens, and regional emerging-brand chains outside the Top 500. The volume is in the long tail.
Who owns these restaurant chains?
Most of the brands are publicly held or owned by private equity. Taco Bell and KFC sit under Yum Brands. Burger King sits under Restaurant Brands International, alongside Tim Hortons and Popeyes. Dunkin' and Subway are private-equity owned, by Inspire Brands and Roark Capital respectively. McDonald's, Starbucks, Wendy's, Domino's, and Chipotle are independent public companies. Chick-fil-A is private, family-owned, and uniquely structured.
How do you sell into the top restaurant chains?
Through corporate procurement, which means long cycles, RFPs, and tight vendor short lists. For the 200,000-plus independent and small-multi-unit operators that own the other two thirds of the market, the buyer is the owner-operator or a single-person ops director, and the cycle is days, not quarters. Most vendors that want growth at all in 2026 are building the long-tail motion alongside the enterprise one.
Can I get a sample of independent restaurant operator data?
Yes. Tell us the cities, cuisine types, or unit-count bands you want to target, and we send a sample of roughly 100 verified operator records, with the named owner, a direct email, and a direct dial, so you can check the data against your own pipeline before anything changes hands. There is no charge for the sample.
See the chain-restaurant dataset before you commit.
Tell us the cities, cuisine types, or unit-count bands you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified operator records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
Get the sample