List of Countries by Franchise Units

The World Franchise Council's tries to keep track of franchise units by country. Their list is a work-in-process. Numbers are estimated and are quite soft in many cases. For example, it is falsely stated here that Mexico has 462,000 franchise units, making it the second largest market in the world. This is most likely a typographical error, since elsewhere on their website Mexico is shown to have 50,000. China is stated to have 120,000 but that is most likely a definitional problem of what a business-format franchise is.

According to the WFC, the U.S. has roughly 770,000 business-format franchise units.