How Much Does a Griswold Home Care Franchise Owner Make?

Officially, Item 19 measures Gross Receipts, not owner earnings. For the one-territory Agency Model cohort open throughout 2025, the 2026 FDD reports 2025 average Gross Receipts of $1,379,078 and median Gross Receipts of $707,699 across 23 owners. Nine owners, or 39%, met or exceeded the average. The gap between the average and median shows that a small number of larger businesses pull the mean upward.

The FDD defines Gross Receipts as money received for services and goods, excluding sales tax, client reimbursements for actual expenses, and specified billing adjustments. That is revenue before caregiver payroll, payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, office staff, rent, insurance, local marketing, royalty, brand-fund contributions, technology, bad debt, interest, depreciation, and owner compensation.

Source: 2026 Griswold International, LLC FDD, Item 19, pp. 38–42. Multi-territory figures are portfolio revenue per owner, not revenue per territory. They should not be divided or multiplied without understanding shared staff, territory maturity, and overhead.

How broad is the reporting population?

Official Item 19 data cover 59 franchised Agency Model locations operating 112 territories for the entire 2025 calendar year. Its average Gross Receipts were $2,048,633 and its median was $1,492,691. Item 19 excluded 22 territories that opened during 2025 and were not open for the full year, plus one franchised location that ceased operations during the measurement period. Those exclusions make the disclosure more useful for full-year performance, but less representative of startup and closure risk.

Item 20 reports that Agency Model franchised outlets increased from 114 at the start of 2025 to 135 at year-end, with 22 openings and one cessation for other reasons. Registry Model outlets are separately reported and are not combined with this Agency Model earnings estimate. Source: 2026 FDD, Item 20, pp. 43–50.

The estimate applies a transparent revenue and margin sensitivity to the official one-territory median. Because Item 19 gives no single-territory profit distribution, the model uses 80%, 100%, and 120% of the $707,699 median Gross Receipts as analytical revenue anchors. It then applies a 6.56%, 9.56%, and 12.56% residual margin.

The 9.56% central margin is derived from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 Service Annual Survey for taxable employer firms in NAICS 62412, Services for the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities: $32.758 billion of revenue less $29.625 billion of total expenses, divided by revenue. The conservative and upside margins are the benchmark minus or plus 3 percentage points. This is a sensitivity band, not a Census forecast and not a Griswold disclosure.

• Revenue: $566,159, $707,699, and $849,239, equal to 80%, 100%, and 120% of official single-territory median Gross Receipts.
• Margin: 6.56%, 9.56%, and 12.56%, based on the Census-derived residual margin with a ±3 percentage-point sensitivity.
• Fee treatment: the Census ratio is an all-in expense benchmark, so the model does not subtract the 5% royalty and 1% General Marketing Fee a second time. This avoids double counting, but creates a comparability limitation because the Census population is not limited to franchises.
• Debt and accounting: the residual is not EBITDA. The Census expense concept is broad and may incorporate industry-average interest and depreciation. Financing principal, capital expenditures, and personal income taxes are not calculated.
• Rounding: formulas use unrounded inputs; displayed earnings are rounded to the nearest $1,000.

The official owner-participation requirement means active involvement can increase total economic benefit, but it does not create additional passive profit. The 2026 FDD requires a new franchisee, for the first three years of operation, to directly supervise and manage the business and devote full time and energy to it. After that period, the franchise may be managed by an approved, trained full-time manager who must hold a 10% interest in the franchise. Source: 2026 FDD, Item 15, pp. 31–32.

To illustrate the value of owner labor, the model adds the May 2023 BLS annual mean wage of $102,870 for General and Operations Managers in NAICS 624100, Individual and Family Services. The result is labeled estimated owner-operator benefit: business residual plus the market value of work performed by the owner.

The largest disclosed sales-based charges are the 5% royalty and 1% General Marketing Fee, with minimum-payment provisions. Item 6 also requires local marketing and identifies other recurring or periodic costs. These obligations matter because the external Census margin is not a Griswold-specific cost bridge.

The scenario model does not deduct these charges line by line because it starts from an all-in industry expense ratio. Subtracting them again would imply they are absent from the benchmark and could double count expense burden. A buyer’s operating model should instead rebuild the P&L from actual bill rates, caregiver pay, payroll burden, staffing, occupancy, marketing, and every Item 6 fee.

FDD sources: 2026 Griswold International, LLC FDD, Item 6, pp. 10–15; Item 7, pp. 15–17. Item 7’s $99,600–$185,600 initial investment is startup capital, not an annual operating expense and is not subtracted from one year of Gross Receipts.

The largest uncertainty is official Item 19’s omission of operating expenses and profit for the 2025 full-year franchised-location population. The estimate therefore cannot observe the actual spread between client billing and caregiver compensation, office payroll, owner salary, bad debt, insurance, and local overhead for the 23 one-territory owners.

Sales outcomes vary widely

Official 2025 Item 19 results show wide dispersion. The one-territory Agency Model cohort ranged from $61,937 to $5,178,426 of Gross Receipts, while its median was $707,699. Across all 59 full-year franchised locations, the bottom-quartile median was $246,776 and the top-quartile median was $3,598,181. Those quartiles mix single- and multi-territory owners, so they illustrate system dispersion rather than a clean one-territory probability distribution.

Ramp-up is visible, but the cohorts are small

Official Item 19 ramp data show rising revenue in several early cohorts, but the later cohorts are small. For Agency Model territories open 12 to 60 months, the table reports average Gross Receipts of $236,326 in Year 1 across 23 owners, $679,264 in Year 2 across nine owners, $1,165,687 in Year 3 across six owners, $1,468,945 in Year 4 across five owners, and $1,113,502 in Year 5 across three owners. These are historical cohort observations, not guaranteed milestones. The shrinking sample sizes make later-year figures less stable.

The affiliate gross-margin disclosure is not a franchisee profit margin

Official Part VI data are a company-affiliate proxy, not a franchised owner-profit disclosure. It reports five affiliate-owned Agency Model locations operating 11 territories during 2025, with stated Gross Margin percentages from 49% to 53% and a 51% average. It also defines Gross Margin as “total sales divided by caregiver pay.” That wording does not reconcile cleanly with a conventional percentage margin formula, and the FDD says other operating costs are not included. This analysis therefore does not use the affiliate figure as franchised owner earnings or as the scenario margin. A buyer should request written substantiation and a precise numerator-and-denominator explanation.

Verify the revenue-to-cash bridge with written records and franchisee interviews. The FTC explains that Item 19 is where a franchisor may make sales or earnings claims, while Item 20 helps a buyer evaluate system growth and turnover. Griswold’s FDD states that written substantiation for Item 19 will be available on reasonable request.

• Request the Item 19 substantiation and confirm whether each “location” figure is one territory or a multi-territory portfolio.
• Ask one-territory franchisees for caregiver pay as a percentage of client billings, payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, overtime, and unfilled-shift costs.
• Separate owner salary, owner draw, distributions, retained earnings, and business profit in every franchisee interview.
• Confirm office staffing by year, including care coordination, recruiting, scheduling, sales, and the approved-manager structure after Year 3.
• Model the 5% royalty, 1% General Marketing Fee, local marketing requirement, minimum royalties, technology, insurance, rent, and state licensing costs explicitly.
• Ask about accounts receivable, payer mix, client concentration, refunds, billing adjustments, and bad-debt write-offs.
• Compare startup territories, full-year territories, transferred businesses, and locations that ceased operations rather than relying only on the full-year median.
• Keep debt principal and personal income taxes outside operating earnings; test them separately using the buyer’s actual financing and tax circumstances.

For a full-year, one-territory Griswold Agency Model business, the strongest defensible manager-run estimate is approximately $37,000 to $107,000 of annual pre-tax owner earnings, with a $68,000 base scenario. It is scenario-based, not an official Item 19 profit figure. For an owner who performs the required full-time management work, estimated owner-operator benefit is approximately $140,000 to $210,000, including a $102,870 labor-value benchmark.

The most important earnings driver is the spread between client revenue and caregiver-and-office labor cost at sufficient client volume. The largest unresolved uncertainty is the absence of franchised-location operating expense and owner-compensation data. Before making a decision, a buyer should reconcile Item 19 substantiation, Item 6 fees, and actual franchisee profit-and-loss statements with interviews covering owner hours, manager pay, staffing, collections, and territory maturity.