McDonald’s is back to growing again.
The fast-food giant ended 2025 with 13,706 U.S. restaurants, or 149 more than it operated one year earlier.
That may not seem like much, just 1.1% unit growth. But that was above average among the Technomic Top 500 restaurant chains, where the median chain grew by 0.8%. But it also represented a marked increase in development for a chain that had done little of it for most of the past 20 years.
The 149 new locations represented the largest number McDonald’s has added in its home market since 2002, nearly a quarter century.
To be sure, McDonald’s has been broadcasting this for some time. The company in 2022 told analysts that it had every intent on growing new locations again. “Our strong comp and brand performance has given us the right to build new units at a rate faster than we have historically,” CEO Chris Kempczinski told investors in 2023.
McDonald’s has taken several steps to rebuild its growth pipeline. It has changed franchising standards and started actively recruiting new operators into the system for the first time in years. In 2023, the company poached former Chipotle development chief Tabassum Zalotrawala to lead domestic development.
(Check out our first look at the 2026 Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report.)
For more than two decades, McDonald’s has largely limited growth or even shrunk, opting instead to focus on unit economics instead.
In 2003, bruised by a brutal discount war with rivals Burger King and Wendy’s, McDonald’s deliberately slowed development as part of the “Plan to Win” that was largely executed by the chain’s legendary CEO Jim Skinner.
The chain opened 392 locations in 2002, slowed that to 118 in 2003 and then to 64 in 2004.
The company averaged just 67 new restaurants per year from 2004 to 2014, or just half a percent annual unit growth.
When the company struggled in 2012 with the shift away from the Dollar Menu, McDonald’s started closing locations that no longer fit the brand’s strategy, notably locations inside Walmarts. From 2015 to 2020 McDonald’s closed 900 locations, giving the company less than 13,500 restaurants.
Unit economics improved, however. Since 2005, McDonald’s average-unit volumes have grown by more than 150%, more than offsetting the brand’s restaurant closures. System sales have more than doubled over that time. McDonald’s today is a $55 billion domestic brand.
Of course, McDonald’s has been plenty busy opening new units internationally, where the chain has added more than 700 restaurants a year.
These days the chain has plans to get to 50,000 global restaurants by 2027. It finished last year with 45,356 locations. So it has a few thousand to go yet.
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