India Franchise Cost Index 2026

The Amul Kiosk Index

The cheapest verified franchise in India is an Amul kiosk at ₹3L. That makes it a useful unit of account: pricing every other franchise in Amul kiosks turns crore-scale numbers into something you can picture. One Taj hotel franchise equals 1,200 Amul kiosks. A Maruti Suzuki dealership equals 183.

Only brands whose minimum entry cost is verified against the brand's own official published figures or regulatory filings appear on the index — 25 of the 233 brands we track clear that bar today.

Kiosk counts are computed from each brand's published minimum entry cost for its standard format (brand-official S1 or filing-grade S2 sources only); larger formats cost more. The underlying figures, with their sources, live on each brand's FRANticc profile — click through.

The Customer-Approval League

India's most-loved franchise industry is wellness. Its least-loved serves you dinner. Aggregating 23.0 million Google reviews across 165 rated brands, Health & Wellness tops the league at 4.59 while Food & Beverage sits last at 4.22.

The averages sit close together — Google ratings always do — so the risk signal is in the distribution, not the mean: 24% of Food & Beverage brands rate below 4.0, against 0% in Health & Wellness. In the categories at the bottom of this table, picking the wrong brand costs you more.

The Sweet-Spot Map

Plot every publishable category by what it costs to enter and the gross-margin floor its operators typically report, and India's franchise economy sorts itself into four quadrants. Food & Beverage and Health & Wellness sit in the sweet spot — entry below the all-India median with the highest margin floors. Automotive is the precarious poster child: the highest entry cost on the map with the thinnest margin floor.

Quadrant lines sit at the all-India medians: ₹30L entry capex and a 20% gross-margin floor (n=208). Margin bases differ by industry — a vehicle dealership's margin on a car's price is not the same animal as a QSR's gross margin on food cost — so compare positions within a quadrant, not margins across unrelated industries. Low-capex/low-margin categories (Building & Interiors, Electricals) are volume businesses, not bad businesses.

The Entry-Cost Reality Gap

The number a brand advertises is not the number you will need. Across the 115 brands where we can compute the full commitment — setup capex plus franchise fee plus working capital plus security deposit — the median all-in figure is ₹48L, 60% above the median advertised capex of ₹30L. The extras below the waterline are individually unremarkable and collectively decisive.

The all-in figure is computed per brand and then aggregated (n=115); the component medians come from partly different brand subsets, so they will not sum exactly to it. Fee and royalty statistics cover true franchise models only — dealership-family models charge margin, not royalty, and mixing the two would flatter both.

Appendix — category tables

Medians with interquartile ranges for every category that clears the publishing gate (≥8 brands with source-graded values). Categories below the gate are tracked but not published.

*Franchise-class models only (FOFO/FOCO). A dash means the stat did not clear the ≥8-brand gate at the report's source-tier cut — Automotive's fee and royalty columns are dashed because vehicle dealerships charge margin, not royalty. Per-brand figures, with their sources, live on each brand's FRANticc page.

Methodology & limitations

Dataset. 233 India-platform brands (232 with a structured investment model), one primary format per brand so multi-format brands never double-count. All statistics are medians with interquartile ranges; no stat is published from fewer than 8 brands.

Source grading. Every data point on FRANticc carries a source tier from S1 (brand-official) to S7 (estimated). This report's aggregates use tiers S1–S5 only — aggregator-sourced (S6) and estimated (S7) values are excluded. The Amul Kiosk Index is stricter still: S1/S2 only. The full grading system is documented on our methodology page.

What we chose not to publish. Breakeven timelines (insufficient verified data), employment-per-rupee intensity (insufficient verified staffing data), and store-count growth leagues (historical series still under verification). They will appear in later editions when the underlying data clears our bar — not before. Google-ratings figures are J-shaped and range-restricted, which is why the league reports distribution shares and spreads rather than leaning on averages alone.

Corrections. Errors flagged to [email protected] are reviewed within 48 hours; corrections are noted on this page.