How Much Does a KOA Franchise Owner Make?

It measures Operating Profit per camper night, not annual owner salary or personal take-home pay. The official 2024 calculation covers franchised campgrounds that operated for the full year and submitted complete financial information. KOA grouped results by brand position and annual camper-night band.

Item 19 defines one camper night as one rented campground or lodging site for one night. The count can include rented but unoccupied seasonal or long-term sites, so it is a utilization measure rather than a guest-headcount measure. The disclosure calculates revenue, expense, Gross Profit, and Operating Profit on that basis.

What is included and excluded?

The official measure includes ordinary campground operating expenses and stated franchise charges, but it excludes major financing, property, and noncash costs. Those exclusions are why Operating Profit can exceed cash available for distribution.

Included in Operating Expenses

Salaries and Benefits, utilities, operating supplies, property taxes, repairs and maintenance, advertising and promotion, auto expense, insurance, miscellaneous expense, an imputed 8% royalty, an imputed 2% advertising assessment, and a $1,750 administrative fee.

Excluded from Operating Profit

Interest expense, depreciation, lease payments, and debt service. Capital expenditures and personal income taxes are also not presented as deductions.

Owner compensation

Item 19 does not state consistently whether owner salary, draws, or distributions are contained in Salaries and Benefits. That prevents Operating Profit from being treated as a clean per-owner compensation figure.

Data quality

The underlying franchisee reports were unaudited and not independently verified by the franchisor.

Source: 2026 KOA Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 19, pp. 35–52.

The annual estimate multiplies each KOA Holiday median Operating Profit per camper night by an explicit annual camper-night assumption. The FDD supplies the profit rates and volume bands; it does not supply the selected annual volume points.

• Conservative volume: 3,000 camper nights is an editorial point within the FDD's 1,000–5,000 band.
• Base volume: 7,500 camper nights is an editorial midpoint within the 5,001–10,000 band.
• Upside volume: 15,000 camper nights is an editorial point within the open-ended 10,001-and-up band, not an FDD average or probability.
• No financing or tax deduction: The scenarios do not subtract interest, lease payments, principal payments, capital expenditures, or personal income taxes.

The official median Operating Profit per camper night varies materially by both brand position and annual camper-night band. KOA Resort shows the highest disclosed median, $40.07, but that result comes from only eight reporting campgrounds, all in the 10,001-and-up band.

Active operation can increase the owner's total economic benefit when the owner replaces a paid on-site manager, but the added amount is compensation for labor—not passive business profit. Item 15 does not require personal day-to-day operation, although KOA recommends it; a non-operating owner must use direct on-premises manager supervision.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lodging-manager data reports a May 2024 median annual wage of $56,170 for lodging managers in RV parks and recreational camps. That is a national occupation benchmark, not a KOA-specific manager cost, and it excludes the employer's payroll taxes and benefits.

This owner-operator bridge is a sensitivity, not an Item 19 result. It is valid only when the owner actually performs comparable management work and a similar paid-manager cost is avoided.

The official 2024 Operating Profit already incorporates an 8% royalty and 2% advertising assessment on Registration Revenue, so those charges should not be subtracted again. Current Item 6 obligations still matter because not every present fee is separately visible in the historical profit table.

Optional Revenue Managed Services, Marketing Managed Services, and text-messaging services are not included in this article's core scenarios. A buyer should add them only when the operating plan actually uses those services.

Source: 2026 KOA FDD, Item 6, pp. 5–9; Item 19 notes, pp. 45, 47, and 49.

The largest unresolved uncertainty is the gap between disclosed Operating Profit and cash actually distributable to one owner. Debt structure, property ownership, lease terms, owner payroll treatment, and recurring capital needs are not resolved by the Item 19 table.

• Financing: Interest and debt service are excluded. A heavily financed campground may produce positive Operating Profit while distributing little cash.
• Real estate: Lease payments are excluded. The disclosed measure is therefore not comparable across an owned-property campground and a leased-property campground without adjustment.
• Capital spending: Road, utility, cabin, pool, bathhouse, and site upgrades can consume cash even when they do not appear as current operating expenses.
• Reporting selection: The profit sample excluded 141 campgrounds that did not provide complete financial information and 11 that opened during 2024.
• Closed outlets: The FDD states that 17 franchised campgrounds permanently closed as KOA campgrounds in 2024 and another 17 in 2025; closure context is not captured in the full-year 2024 reporting cohort.
• Open-ended high-volume band: “10,001 and up” covers a broad range, so a 15,000-night scenario should not be read as the average of that group.

Item 20 reports 432 franchised KOA campgrounds at the end of 2025, up from 429 at the start of that year. System count alone does not establish the profitability of an individual campground.

A buyer should reconstruct the target campground's earnings from source records rather than treating the $46,000–$207,000 range as a forecast. The most useful diligence compares the target's camper nights, rates, site mix, payroll, property costs, and capital plan with the exact Item 19 cohort.

• Request Item 19 written substantiation and confirm how Gross Profit, Operating Expense, and Operating Profit were calculated for each brand-position and camper-night band.
• Ask whether owner wages, family payroll, management-company fees, and on-site housing benefits were included in Salaries and Benefits for comparable campgrounds.
• Separate Registration Revenue, Store Sales Revenue, and Other Revenue; apply royalty and advertising only to the FDD-defined Total Registration Receipts base.
• Obtain the target property's last three years of monthly camper nights, site-class revenue, payroll, utilities, repairs, insurance, property tax, and merchant-processing charges.
• Model lease payments, interest, principal, deferred maintenance, and required upgrades outside the FDD Operating Profit figure.
• Interview current and former franchisees in the same KOA brand position, climate pattern, and volume band, following the due-diligence approach in the FTC's consumer guide to buying a franchise.