QSR Landscape

Quick-service franchise brands, ranked by what they cost to run.

The Halal Guys franchise

The Halal Guys: $461,400–$1,333,500 total investment, $60,000 franchise fee, 9% total ongoing fee. Read out of the filings.

Compiled from public filings and operator sites Reviewed 2026-08-15

9% Total ongoing fee
$461,400–$1,333,500 Total investment
93 Units, 2024
1990 Founded
2014 Franchising since
NY Astoria
Typical size, sq ft
No Item 19

Fees

Initial franchise fee $60,000
Royalty 6%
Brand fund 2%
Local advertising 1%
Total ongoing 9% of gross sales
Grand opening $17,000
Transfer fee $10,000
Renewal fee $5,000

Opening one

Total investment $461,400–$1,333,500
Training 24 hours classroom, 136 on the job
Territory Quarter-mile to two-mile radius, set by area
Initial term 10 years
Renewal One ten-year option

The system

Format New York platter cart turned QSR
Headquarters Astoria, NY
Founded 1990
Franchising since 2014
Units 93, of which 88 franchised and 5 company-owned
Item 19 No financial performance representation.

From cart identity to restaurant system

The Halal Guys began as a Manhattan food-cart business in 1990 and started franchising in 2014. The May 2024 comparative study behind this row records 93 outlets: 88 franchised and five company-owned. Headquarters is in Astoria, New York.

The food is chicken, beef gyro and falafel served primarily in platters and wraps, not German döner in toasted pide. The operator’s franchise page still presents the cart-origin menu as the center of the system. It belongs in this directory as an adjacent halal fast-casual benchmark, not as another name for the same sandwich.

The Halal Guys franchise storefront in a suburban Virginia shopping plaza
The Springfield Plaza franchise occupies a conventional inline retail bay, showing how the cart-origin brand translates into a suburban storefront with a full customer entrance and dining-room frontage. Photograph by Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; web-optimized derivative shared under the same license.

Certification and disclosure answer different questions

The company publishes halal certification documents for chicken and beef gyro. Those documents support product-specific certification claims. They do not establish franchise economics, and the FDD does not determine religious compliance; each source has its own job.

The comparable fee stack is 9%: 6% royalty, 2% brand fund and 1% local advertising. The initial franchise fee is $60,000, and Item 7 runs from $461,400 to $1,333,500. The width of that range deserves format- and site-specific explanation before the low end is treated as a budget.

The source records no Item 19 financial performance representation. Training is 24 classroom hours and 136 on the job. The initial term is ten years with one ten-year renewal. Territory ranges from a quarter-mile to two miles, depending on the area.

The operator now makes later growth claims on its franchise page, but the directory leaves 93 as the dated 2024 count rather than mixing current marketing with the older study. That separation is especially important for a widely recognized brand: present visibility is not a substitute for the source year or a missing Item 19.

Figures from May 2024 comparative study of published FDDs · dataset year 2024.