Subway closed more than 600 locations in 2024, according to the company’s franchise disclosure documents, as the company’s long-running pullback neared a decade.
The Miami-based sandwich giant finished 2024 with 19,502 restaurants, according to the FDD. It’s the first time in 20 years that the chain has fewer than 20,000 locations.
The company has now shed 7,600 restaurants since 2015, when it peaked at 27,100 restaurants in the U.S.
Put another way: Subway’s U.S. franchisees have closed 28% of the chain’s locations in less than a decade. The 7,600 locations Subway has closed is equal to the number of Taco Bell restaurants there are in the U.S.
The challenge for the brand is, and has been, its low unit volumes. Subway did generate the highest average-unit volumes in its history in 2024 at $490,000, according to estimates from Restaurant Business sister company Technomic. And that has increased since 2020 thanks to a series of efforts by the company to build sales, including marketing, new product introductions and ingredient improvements.
But last year’s unit volumes increased just 1% compared with 2023, so the average Subway unit lost customers after factoring in 4% restaurant menu price increases. And it remains low compared with its rivals and other sandwich concepts. Subway’s average-unit volume was lower than all but 19 other restaurant chains on the Technomic Top 500 last year.
The other brands—outside of Quiznos, which generates just $430,000 in sales per restaurant per year—are typically treat concepts or those with a heavy concentration of nontraditional or mall locations. By comparison, rival Jersey Mike’s volumes are $1.3 million. Both Firehouse and Jimmy John’s average volumes are near $1 million.
Subway’s average unit volumes reached $481,000 per location in 2012, when it was the country’s second-largest restaurant chain by system sales. Those volumes declined the next year, starting a run of eight straight years in which that figure declined.
Had those 2012 average unit volumes simply kept pace with inflation, the average location would make $667,983 per store, about 36% more than it did last year.
Weak average unit volumes became particularly problematic as the cost of food and labor continued to increase, ultimately forcing franchisees to start closing more restaurants than the chain opened every year starting in 2016.
Subway remains the largest U.S. restaurant chain by unit count. It still operates 2,600 more locations than the next biggest, Starbucks, which finished 2024 with just under 17,000 coffee shops. With Subway closing about 600 locations per year, however, and Starbucks adding about that many—even amid recent sales challenges—the coffee giant can be expected to overtake the sandwich chain at the top of that particular ranking in two to three years.
Subway’s struggles with closures have seen it fall down the ranking of the Top 500 restaurant chains. The company generated $9.5 billion in system sales in the U.S. last year, down 3.8% compared with 2023. But it fell to No. 9 on the ranking, from No. 8 last year. Chipotle Mexican Grill, which largely adopted Subway’s assembly line style of counter service, leapfrogged both the sandwich chain and Burger King on the Top 10.
In some respects, Subway’s closures have slowed. Since 2015 it has closed an average of 950 locations per year, so the 631 net closures were an improvement. But the company also closed nearly 200 more restaurants than in 2023. And its closure rate was 3% of restaurants, compared with 2% in 2023.
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