Transparency
Every brand profile and per-brand report on FranchiseCensus is built from public data. We don't pay for an exclusive feed and we don't hide our sources. The value we add is structure, normalization, peer benchmarking, and the link back to the original document so you can verify any figure yourself.
Every byte of data we sell is publicly available — somewhere, in some format, in some language. Our value is structure, normalization, peer benchmarking, and the link back to the source. We never claim exclusivity over data we didn't create.
Every per-brand report includes a Source Documents appendix with direct links to the state-filed FDD and KFTC disclosure we extracted from. If a number in our report doesn't match the source, the source wins — and we want to know about it.
Roughly 38% of US franchise systems publish a Financial Performance Representation (Item 19). The rest leave it blank. We surface what exists. We do not invent numbers, model unit economics from comparables, or fill blanks with averages from the category.
12,276 of our 22,863 brands are Korean — sourced directly from KFTC. Most US-facing franchise sites have zero Korean coverage. If you're researching a Korean brand entering the US, this is the only structured source in English.
The 14 US registration states each maintain their own franchise filings portal. We pull from the ones with usable digital archives, structure the filings, and surface them on per-brand profiles. Every source is named, every FDD links back.
California is one of the 14 US registration states. We pull every active and historical FDD filing from the DocQNet portal — these are the franchisor's own legal documents, filed under penalty of perjury.
Minnesota's CARDS portal has one of the most complete franchise registration archives in the country. We pull both clean FDDs and amendments here — about 4,000 filings per year flow through this source.
Indiana has historically been one of the most permissive states for FDD access. The Indiana scraper is our largest single source for older filings — 1,512 brands extracted to date.
Wisconsin DFI handles franchise registration in the state. We use it as a secondary cross-check on franchisor identity and filing dates when CA / MN / IN have conflicting metadata.
Washington is one of the 14 US registration states with a public franchise filings index. We use it for verification rather than primary extraction.
The North American Securities Administrators Association runs a multi-state EFD portal that several states feed into. 482 brands in our database originate from EFD filings — and the NASAA EFD scraper runs weekly to catch new ones.
Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Virginia — each has its own franchise filings portal, with varying degrees of digital accessibility. We pull from each one as their data becomes available.
The Small Business Administration maintains a list of franchises eligible for SBA loans. We use it as a sanity-check for which brands are actively operating.
12,276 Korean brands sourced directly from the KFTC's franchise disclosure portal. Updated quarterly. KOGL Type 1 license. This is the canonical source for Korean franchise registrations and we are not aware of any other US-facing site that has all 12k+ brands structured.
We crawl the franchisor's own .com (and the parent company's investor relations page where one exists) for logo, executive bios, store-locator counts, and press releases. Our crawler respects robots.txt without exception.
Used for founding year, headquarters location, parent company, and brand description fallback when the FDD has no clean data. Every Wikipedia-sourced field is tagged in our metadata column with a `wikipedia` provenance entry.
For verification of KFTC enforcement actions, store closings, and international expansion announcements on Korean brands. Used in the Korea Franchise Market Intelligence Report 2026.
Found a number that doesn't match the source? Want to know which sources back a specific figure? Email us at [email protected].
See per-brand reports