McDonald’s adds 149 new U.S. locations after closing nearly 900 over the past decade

The Golden Arches are back in expansion mode.

After years of closing nearly 900 locations over the past decade, McDonald's is opening more restaurants again. The fast-food giant added 149 new U.S. restaurants in 2025, ending the year with 13,706 locations. That might not sound like a lot at first glance, but it’s actually McDonald’s biggest burst of domestic growth since 2002.

The shrink before the growth

Back in the early 2000s, the company pulled back hard on development after getting bruised by discount wars with Burger King and Wendy’s. In 2002, it opened 392 locations in the U.S. That dropped to 118 in 2003, then just 64 in 2004. 

From 2004 to 2014, McDonald’s averaged only 67 new restaurants a year, which is basically a crawl for a brand that size.

Then came another reset.

When McDonald’s struggled in 2012 during the messy shift away from the Dollar Menu, it started closing locations that no longer made sense for the brand. A lot of those were restaurants inside Walmart stores or other spots that didn’t fit where McDonald’s wanted to go next. 

From 2015 to 2020, it closed 900 locations, bringing its U.S. footprint to under 13,500 restaurants.

It was more of a financial cleanup

Instead of spreading itself thin, McDonald’s focused on unit economics—basically, making each restaurant more productive and profitable. And that strategy paid off in a big way. 

Since 2005, the chain’s average-unit volumes have grown by more than 150%, and its system sales have more than doubled. McDonald’s is now a $55 billion domestic brand, giving a pretty strong argument that fewer stores doesn’t always mean less power.

The expansion has been in the works for a while

These 149 new locations weren’t just a random burst of optimism, as McDonald’s has been signaling this move for a while. 

In 2022, the company told analysts it planned to start growing new units again. In 2023, CEO Chris Kempczinski said the brand’s strong comparable sales and overall performance had earned it the right to build restaurants faster than it had historically.

And the food chain didn’t just say that and hope for the best. It actually started rebuilding the pipeline. 

It updated its franchising standards, began actively recruiting new operators for the first time in years, and in 2023, brought in former Chipotle development chief Tabassum Zalotrawala to lead domestic development.

The global ambition is bigger

The chain has been opening more than 700 restaurants a year internationally, and it ended last year with 45,356 locations worldwide. 

The big goal is to hit 50,000 global restaurants by 2027, which means it still has a few thousand more to go. So the expansion in the U.S. is really just one piece of a much larger scale-up.

Source: Restaurant Business