FDD Item 20: how many outlets open and close

Item 20 looks at the 3 most recent fiscal years. Here, a fiscal year simply means the yearly period a company picks for its books, and it doesn't have to line up with the calendar year. In each of those years, you'll find the outlet total when the year began and when it closed.

There's also a separate table of transfers. That one counts franchised outlets that passed from one owner to another, so you can see how often owners sell. Together with the opening and closing counts, the FTC says this helps show a brand's growth and how often its owners change.

The FDD hands you counts, not one tidy percentage. Item 20(3) breaks the changes down by state and year, and each kind means something different, so not every one is a business failure:

• terminated, meaning the franchise agreement was ended
• not renewed, meaning the agreement ran out and was not extended
• reacquired, in other words purchased back by the franchisor
• ceased operations, which gets its own column

These columns help you tell closed locations apart from changes such as the franchisor buying an outlet back. You can spot which type of change happens most for a brand and whether it keeps climbing year after year.

Only franchised outlets appear here, drawn from each brand's 2026 FDD filed on the Minnesota registry. The opening figure is where the brand stood when 2023 began, and the rest show the counts at the close of each year.

Every year brought more 7 Brew locations, while Crumbl's count also rose, though the gains got smaller over time. Blaze Pizza ended each year with fewer outlets than it started. F45 Training's franchised outlet count rose in 2023, then fell in 2024 and 2025. Burger King's franchised total dropped by 1,116 in 2024, then slipped by only 6 the following year.

Company-owned outlets get their own count. When 2025 closed, Burger King operated 1,132 of them, 7 Brew operated 24, F45 Training operated 2, and Blaze Pizza and Crumbl operated none. A drop in the total is not a count of closures, since the state-by-state table separates openings, ended or unrenewed agreements, buybacks and outlets that ceased operating.

You can set these Item 20 counts beside the fees and costs for each brand on the side-by-side comparison, or dig into the whole FDD.

Item 20 names all current franchisees, along with each outlet's address and phone number. It also names the franchisees who departed during the most recent fiscal year, so you can get in touch with people from both groups.

According to the FTC, hearing from franchisees directly may be the most reliable way to test what the franchisor claims. It recommends talking with owners whose outlets have been running for just over 1 year, since they can tell you their total investment and whether they're breaking even. Those numbers pair well with the Item 7 investment range and the earnings details in Item 19.

Item 20(3) splits the numbers out state by state, which lets you zero in on the state where you plan to open. The FTC notes that a cluster of closures near you may signal trouble, so several exits in your own backyard are worth asking about. If you see closures nearby, the former franchisees listed in Item 20 are worth calling to hear what happened.