Burger Restaurant Feasibility Studies

Burger restaurants are limited-service chains built around the hamburger, and the large systems are mostly franchised, freestanding drive-thru units. The franchisor fixes the menu, the box and the fee load, so what a study has left to prove is the site's sales, the full occupancy cost and the borrower's capacity to carry the debt. This page sits under the quick-service restaurant hub, which covers SBA loan data for limited-service restaurants as a group, drive-thru and grease rules, net lease pricing and the other menu categories; here the subject is the burger brand and what it discloses.

The brand choice settles much of the credit before the site is studied. Trade-press unit volumes for 2025 put McDonald's at $4,088 thousand and Wendy's at $2,001 thousand, with Burger King at $1,660 thousand ¹. Three other systems sit near or above McDonald's: Culver's at $4,040K, Whataburger at $3,914K and In-N-Out at $6,032K ¹. Dairy Queen reported $5.01 billion of systemwide sales ²².

Those volumes are company-submitted and compiled by a magazine. The disclosure with legal weight is Item 19 of the franchise disclosure document, and it shows how far one unit can sit from the average. Wendy's 2026 FDD averages $1,993,657 of gross sales across 5,347 franchise restaurants for fiscal 2025, from a weakest unit at $391,533 to a strongest at $7,726,390, and fewer than half reached the average ². Company restaurants averaged $2,250,384 across 367 units ². A year earlier the figures were $2,108,454 for franchise units and $2,326,904 for company units ³, so both groups fell. Culver's discloses $4,142,737 of average sales across 988 franchised restaurants ¹³, and Jack in the Box a franchise average of $1,913,335 for fiscal 2025 against $1,986,186 the year before ¹⁹.

The decline at Wendy's came from fewer visits, not lower prices: its 10-K attributes the fiscal 2025 sales change to a traffic decline partly offset by a higher average check ⁵. No public source in the research publishes a burger menu price change for 2025 to 2026, or a ramp benchmark for a new unit, so any price growth or opening-year curve in a pro forma is the study's own assumption and should be labelled as one.

An Item 7 range is the franchisor's estimate of what a franchisee spends to open, written wide enough to hold across the system. Its use is a reasonableness test on bids and equipment quotes; its trap is what it leaves out. Wendy's 2025 range assumes a cash buyer and excludes real property ³, and the 2026 summary gives a range of $1,580,457 to $3,105,000 without restating what it leaves out ⁴, so the exclusion has to be read from the FDD. Burger King's top end fell from $4,705,600 in the 2025 FDD to $3,320,600 in 2026 ¹⁵, so the edition a study cites matters, and its 2025 sources disagree on the site: the summary reports the 2025 range as stated excluding real estate ¹⁵, while a breakdown of the same Item 7 lists real property and occupancy at $300,000 to $1,500,000 ¹⁶. A Burger King budget therefore has to be read against the FDD itself before land is added or left out. Jack in the Box excludes land from its prototype range ¹⁴, and at the top of that range the build alone costs more than a year of the system's average franchise sales ¹⁹. Culver's prices land on its own line beside a building line that reaches $4.391 million ¹⁷, so a Culver's project is a land-and-building purchase in a way the others are not.

Who owns the real estate changes the loan. McDonald's owned about 56% of the land and 80% of the buildings for restaurants in its consolidated markets at the end of 2025 ¹², so its franchisees typically operate on sites the franchisor controls and borrow against the business; the brand also asks for a 40% down payment on a new restaurant and $500,000 of liquidity ¹⁴, well above the SBA floor. Wendy's is a landlord on a smaller scale, carrying $386.2 million of land, $541.2 million of buildings and improvements, $480.3 million of leasehold improvements and $395.5 million of equipment, $1,803.3 million gross, at December 28, 2025 ⁵. The study should say whether the borrower buys the site or leases it from the franchisor or a third party, and price occupancy to match.

The research found no primary construction cost per square foot for burger restaurants, no published building size, acreage or crew size for McDonald's, Wendy's or Burger King, and no total project cost for the unit size SBA most often finances. Those come from the subject's site plan, bids and the franchisor's prototype drawings.

A burger franchise borrows under SBA rules only if its brand is listed in the SBA Franchise Directory, a condition in place since June 1, 2025 ³². A ground-up unit financed with 7(a) carries an equity injection of at least 10% and must show 1.15x coverage within two years of opening, within a 7(a) limit of $5 million ²⁵. Where the franchisee buys or builds the real estate, SBA 504 is the usual fit, with a borrower contribution of 10%, 15% for a new business or a special purpose property, and 20% when both apply ²⁵. SBA defines special purpose as a limited-market property with a unique physical design, special construction materials, or a layout that restricts its utility to the use for which it was built ²⁵; whether a burger building falls in that class is the CDC's reading of the property, as the hub's capital routes section sets out for every menu. On a 504 franchise loan the CDC's closing counsel now signs off on the legal sufficiency of the franchise agreement in its opinion ³¹.

Buying an operating burger restaurant is a different test. For applications received by SBA on or after October 1, 2026, an initial acquisition needs 1.25x on the seller's historical cash flow, read from one or two fiscal years, and a quality-of-earnings report applies at $3 million or more ²⁴²⁵. The SOP makes one narrow exception to the projection and quality-of-earnings rules, for an owner-occupied special purpose purchase, set out with the special purpose question above. Whether a study is ordered at all is the lender's call under SBA's rule, 13 CFR 120.160(b): SBA may require professional appraisals, a survey, or a feasibility study ²⁶, and our note on the feasibility study myth explains when lenders ask for one anyway. What our burger files contain for SBA lenders and CDCs is on the SBA 7(a) and 504 practice; bank loans outside SBA are on the conventional practice.

The brand histories come from an aggregator that builds them from SBA's 7(a) and 504 FOIA files without splitting the two programs, mixes many years of lending and lists one brand under several names. Culver's appears three times, at a 0.0% and a 4.0% charge-off rate and once with no rate shown, and Sonic and Hardee's twice each, so no single row is the brand's record ²³. Dairy Queen appears under more than a dozen entries, too many to set out here, and this page gives no rate for it; the hub's failure list sets out how a study handles a split record. Culver's offers no franchisor financing under Item 10 ¹⁷, so the whole debt on a Culver's unit sits with banks and CDCs. Lenders read these records as a prior on the brand; our notes on SBA default economics and franchise against non-franchise credit explain how far one should move a single-unit decision. The research found no typical loan term or rate for burger units and no 2024 to 2026 burger project with a named lender.

Neither names its brand, so read both for method rather than numbers: how a competitor census is drawn and how an Item 19 average is discounted to one site. The full list is in the hub's case section. The quick-service restaurant hub also carries the other menu categories, each with its own cost and closure profile: chicken, pizza, sandwich and subs and Mexican. Our note on why feasibility studies fail review collects the findings that recur across them.