Franchise disclosure documents lodged with the ACCC are public. Aggregating them, across the top forty franchise systems in Australia by outlet count, produces a picture of franchise fee structures that most franchisees are, in interviews, quietly frustrated by.

What the fees look like

The typical fee stack is: an initial franchise fee (between $30,000 and $150,000), an ongoing royalty (usually 6 to 12 per cent of gross revenue), a marketing levy (usually 2 to 4 per cent of gross revenue), and, in many systems, a range of mandatory service fees for training, technology, and audit.

The frustration

The frustration is not about paying fees; franchisees enter the arrangement knowing there are fees. The frustration is about the granularity of the fees at scale. A cafe generating $1.5 million in revenue pays roughly $180,000 a year to the franchisor, in most systems, before the franchisor incurs any variable cost. Whether the value delivered by the franchisor justifies the fee is, in most industry surveys, contested.