Senior Care Franchising Is Single-Speed: What 31 FDDs Show

Senior care franchising grew almost across the board in the latest filing cycle. Of the 31 senior-care brands with both a 2025 and a 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document, 30 held flat or added units, and together they added 469 net locations. Non-medical in-home care, 23 brands and most of the category, added 421 net units without a single brand losing ground.

The same read, a different category

Earlier this month, I read Item 20 across 34 childcare and education brands. That category turned out to be two categories moving in opposite directions: academic tutoring centers contracted while every other sub-segment grew.

So I ran the same read on senior care. Same method: every brand with a 2025 and a 2026 FDD on file, unit counts from Item 20 of each. The shape is completely different.

What Item 20 shows

The one brand that lost units is Boost Home Healthcare, a small medical home-health brand that went from six locations to three.

The growth isn't concentrated in newer brands. The largest, longest-running systems grew alongside the smaller ones:

Why senior care doesn't split the way childcare did

In childcare, the one contracting format was the fixed-site tutoring center, a model that had ridden a post-pandemic surge in demand. Senior care has no equivalent. Demand for in-home care is tied to an aging population, and every service model in the category grew or held.

The structure underneath is different too. Childcare's growth runs through a wide mix of formats, from daycare and swim facilities costing millions to open, to asset-light youth sports territories. Senior care has almost no facility segment. It is overwhelmingly home- and office-based agencies, and the median low end of the estimated initial investment in Item 7 is $102,475.

What the fee and disclosure data show

Item 19 disclosure is near-universal. 30 of the 31 brands (97%) include a financial performance representation. Boost Home Healthcare is the only one that doesn't.

The economics cluster tightly:

Placement and advisory brands carry the highest royalties: Oasis Senior Advisors at 10%, and Senior Care Authority and Trua Senior Living Locators at 8%. Those businesses earn referral fees on a smaller revenue base. Chefs For Seniors, an in-home meal prep concept, is the low-cost outlier at $17,425 to $27,330 to open.

When 23 in-home care brands offer similar services at similar fees, the filings won't differentiate them on price. The differences show up in Item 19 (what franchisees report earning), Item 12 (what territory you get), and Item 20 (how many owners transfer or leave).

How to read these numbers

Net change is the reliable comparison here. A few filings need context. Griswold changed how it reports its outlets between filings, so its numbers aren't comparable year over year and it's excluded from the decliner count. Several brands whose numbers show as flat issued 2026 FDDs that still report fiscal 2024, so they don't yet show a full year of 2025 activity. And unit growth isn't the same as franchisee economics, which Item 19 addresses brand by brand.

The point

Two categories, same reading method, completely different patterns. Childcare is two-speed. Senior care, at least at the unit level, is single-speed, with legacy brands and challengers growing together.

We've now built year-over-year comparisons for more than 600 brands. Patterns like these only show up when you read the filings side by side.