For fifth-year Tommy's Express franchised outlets, the 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document supports this pre-rent operating-cash range, with the 25-outlet average near $875,000. It is not owner take-home pay. Rent or real-estate carrying cost, interest, capital expenditures, financing principal, personal taxes, and any owner-compensation adjustment can materially reduce cash available to the owner.
The dollar EBITDAR figures below are independently derived by multiplying Item 19 Average Gross Sales by the corresponding disclosed EBITDAR percentage. They are not an additional Item 19 financial performance representation by Tommy's Express LLC. The owner-operator figures also combine those FDD facts with a separately identified U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics manager-wage benchmark. Actual results can differ materially by location, tunnel format, sales, labor, utilities, occupancy, financing, owner involvement, maintenance, and execution.
Legal franchisor: Tommy's Express LLC, a Michigan limited liability company. Parent: Tommy Enterprises, Inc. FDD: issued April 14, 2026. Item 19: 2025 Gross Sales, operating expenses, and EBITDAR for 197 franchised outlets grouped by operating tenure. Formats: Item 19 combines eligible franchised outlets and does not publish separate earnings for the 62-foot World Model, 90-foot, 110-foot, 130-foot, or Flex Model configurations. Date checked: July 20, 2026. No matching public 2026 FDD was located on a franchise-controlled domain, so FDD references are cited in plain text by year, Item, and page.
Item 19 reports EBITDAR, not owner salary or distributions
The strongest same-brand measure is official 2025 EBITDAR for franchised outlets. Item 19 also reports Gross Sales and expense lines that include labor, detergents, repairs and maintenance, utilities, local marketing, credit-card fees, property tax, insurance, technology costs, payroll taxes, the 4% Royalty, and the 1% Brand Fund. The disclosure does not show rent, interest, depreciation, amortization, capital expenditures, debt principal, personal taxes, or owner distributions.
Relevant current Item 19 data cover 197 eligible franchised outlets, or about 80.7% of the 244 franchised outlets open at December 31, 2025; the remaining uncertainty is the gap between EBITDAR and actual owner cash after occupancy and financing.
What numbers matter most for a prospective owner?
The central official result is approximately $875,000 of derived 2025 EBITDAR for the 25 Fifth Year Outlets. That figure applies to franchised outlets opened in 2020 and is before rent and financing, not a salary figure.
The official 2025 Average Gross Sales figures range from $1.14 million for First Year Outlets to $2.22 million for Fifth Year + Outlets. Gross Sales do not deduct operating expenses. EBITDAR is closer to operating cash generation, but it still does not deduct rent or real-estate carrying cost.
How does the disclosed earnings measure change as outlets mature?
Derived EBITDAR rises sharply across the official tenure cohorts, from about $171,000 for First Year Outlets to about $911,000 for Fifth Year + Outlets. These are 2025 franchised-outlet averages based on Item 19 Gross Sales and EBITDAR percentages; they are not guarantees or owner take-home figures.
Average Gross Sales multiplied by the disclosed cohort EBITDAR percentage, calendar year 2025.
Interpretation: outlet tenure is strongly associated with higher average Gross Sales and EBITDAR in this disclosure, but the cohorts are not the same outlets followed over time and should not be read as a guaranteed ramp curve.
Source: 2026 Tommy's Express Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 19, pp. 61–64. Calculations use full-precision sales × disclosed margin and are rounded to the nearest $1,000.
What does the mature-outlet spread look like?
For the 25 Fifth Year Outlets opened in 2020, the official 2025 data imply about $354,000 of EBITDAR for the bottom-quartile group, $875,000 for all 25 outlets, and $1.61 million for the top-quartile group. These are derived operating-cash proxies before rent and financing for franchised outlets in the same opening-year cohort.
| Fifth-year scenario anchor | Average Gross Sales | Item 19 EBITDAR | Derived EBITDAR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative: bottom 25% group, 6 outlets | $1,179,461 | 30% | $353,838 |
| Base: all Fifth Year Outlets, 25 outlets | $2,083,929 | 42% | $875,250 |
| Upside: top 25% group, 6 outlets | $3,347,402 | 48% | $1,606,753 |
The quartile labels describe where the six-outlet groups ranked on 2025 Gross Sales. They are not probabilities, forecasts, or minimum and maximum outcomes. Source: 2026 Tommy's Express Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 19, pp. 64–68.
How could owner involvement change the result?
An active owner who personally serves as the required onsite manager could add roughly $73,780 of labor value to the same operating result, but only if the Item 19 labor line already includes a comparable paid manager. This is an estimated owner-operator benefit for U.S. franchised outlets, not passive business profit.
Item 15 permits the franchisee to manage the business directly or employ a manager, while requiring trained onsite supervision. The closest official wage reference is the 2025 BLS median annual wage of $73,780 for first-line supervisors/managers of mechanics, installers, and repairers within the broad Repair and Maintenance subsector. That occupation is not a Tommy's Express-specific job title, so the adjustment is a benchmark sensitivity rather than an FDD fact.
Fifth-year conservative, base, and upside anchors; values remain before rent, debt service, capital expenditures, and personal taxes.
Interpretation: owner operation changes who receives compensation for management labor; it does not create passive profit. The same owner may also face reduced strategic capacity, longer hours, and the need to hire management as a portfolio grows.
Sources: 2026 Tommy's Express Franchise Disclosure Document, Items 15 and 19, pp. 54–55 and 64–68; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Repair and Maintenance wage data, 2025. The wage adjustment is a benchmark assumption.
Do not add a manager wage automatically. First confirm from written Item 19 substantiation whether the reported labor expense includes onsite manager compensation, whether any owners worked without market pay, and whether related-party management fees were included. Otherwise, the adjustment can double count labor value.
What is included in EBITDAR, and what still comes out?
The official Item 19 EBITDAR includes many normal store-level costs and the disclosed recurring franchise fees, but it is explicitly before rent and several owner-level cash demands. The definition applies to the 2025 reporting population and should not be silently renamed net income or take-home pay.
- Gross Sales
- All defined outlet revenue less specified returns, credits, taxes, refunds, and adjustments. It is revenue, not income.
- Item 19 EBITDAR
- Operating result after the disclosed expense lines, but before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, and rent.
- Manager-run pre-tax owner cash proxy
- Item 19 EBITDAR less the actual site's rent or real-estate carrying cost, interest, maintenance capital expenditures, and other omitted owner-level cash expenses.
- Owner-operator benefit
- Residual operating cash plus the market value of management labor performed by the owner. The labor component is compensation for work, not passive profit.
- Debt service
- Interest reduces cash flow and principal reduces cash available to the owner, even though principal is not an income-statement expense.
- Personal taxes
- Excluded from every figure in this article because outcomes depend on entity structure, jurisdiction, deductions, and owner circumstances.
Are the recurring franchise fees already reflected?
Yes, the Item 19 expense tables include Royalty and Brand Fund lines, as well as actual local marketing and technology costs for the reporting cohorts. Therefore, the derived EBITDAR calculations for 2025 franchised outlets should not be charged a second time for the 4% Royalty or 1% Brand Development Fee.
Item 6 separately states the contractual obligations: 4% of Gross Sales for Royalty, 1% for the Brand Development Fund, at least 2% for Local Marketing, and a current Technology Fee of $119 per week, or $6,188 on a 52-week annualization. Actual local-marketing expense in Item 19 varied by cohort, so a buyer should reconcile the contractual minimum to the store's historical ledger. Source: 2026 Tommy's Express Franchise Disclosure Document, Items 6 and 19, pp. 18–22 and 63–68. The official U.S. Tommy's Express franchise page also identifies the 4% Royalty and 1% national brand-fund fee.
Why can actual owner earnings fall outside the displayed range?
The largest unresolved variable is occupancy and capital structure, not the disclosed royalty. Item 19 does not show rent, and Item 7 states that its initial-investment estimates exclude the purchase or long-term lease cost of real estate; the franchisor also states that it does not provide financing for the initial investment.
- Site economics: lease rate, land basis, building cost, property arrangement, local taxes, and required site improvements can move owner cash by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Financing: interest rate, amortization term, financed amount, guarantees, and principal payments determine how much EBITDAR reaches the owner.
- Format mix: Item 19 does not separate 90-foot, 110-foot, 130-foot, Flex Model, and other standard tunnel economics, so format-specific earnings cannot be inferred.
- Population design: 43 franchised outlets operating for less than a full 12 months, four transferred franchised locations, and all 16 corporate outlets were excluded from the Item 19 performance population.
- Unaudited reporting: Tommy's Express states that the information was submitted through a uniform reporting system but was not audited.
- Capital expenditures: recurring repairs are included, butmajor replacement, remodel, and equipment capital outlays may not appear as annual operating expenses.
Item 20 reported 244 franchised outlets at the end of 2025, up from 206 at the start of the year, together with 13 transfers during 2025. Growth expands the system but does not resolve survivorship, ramp-up, transfer, or site-quality differences. Source: 2026 Tommy's Express Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 20, pp. 68–75.
What should a buyer verify before relying on the range?
A buyer should rebuild owner cash from the specific site's records rather than treating the Item 19 averages as a forecast. The following requests apply to a U.S. franchised tunnel location and focus on the gap between reported EBITDAR and actual distributable cash.
- Request the written substantiation for Item 19 and confirm the exact definition of EBITDAR, every expense account, and the treatment of owner compensation and related-party management fees.
- Obtain at least three years of monthly Gross Sales, membership revenue, wash counts, labor, utilities, chemicals, repairs, customer claims, and credit-card fees for comparable mature outlets.
- Confirm whether the onsite manager's full wages, bonuses, payroll taxes, benefits, and recruiting costs are included in the labor line.
- Model the actual lease or real-estate ownership structure, including rent escalators, common-area charges, property tax, insurance, interest, and principal payments.
- Ask current and former franchisees how major equipment replacement, tunnel downtime, weather, seasonality, and local competition affected distributions.
- Compare the proposed tunnel format and market to the 197-outlet Item 19 population; do not assume a World Model or Flex Model has the same economics as the combined cohort.
- Reconcile the 4% Royalty, 1% Brand Development Fee, 2% Local Marketing requirement, Technology Fee, and any required software or supplier charges to the operating model.
- Separate manager-run residual cash, owner labor compensation, debt service, retained earnings, and personal taxes in the final underwriting schedule.
The FTC Consumer's Guide to Buying a Franchise explains that Item 19 is where a franchisor's sales or earnings claims must appear and recommends evaluating the basis and applicability of the figures. The FTC's FDD deep-dive guidance provides additional context for reading financial performance representations and related disclosure items.
What is the most defensible earnings takeaway?
The strongest supported range is approximately $354,000 to $1.61 million of annual pre-rent EBITDAR for fifth-year franchised outlets, with a 25-outlet average near $875,000. It is derived from official 2025 Item 19 Gross Sales and EBITDAR percentages, not a disclosed owner salary or after-rent distribution. The most important operating driver is sales scale as the outlet matures; the largest unresolved uncertainty is the site's rent or real-estate financing burden. An owner who replaces a paid onsite manager may capture additional labor value, but that amount compensates work and should not be treated as passive profit. Before deciding, verify the Item 19 substantiation, the manager-compensation treatment, the exact lease or debt schedule, and comparable franchisee cash distributions after occupancy, capital expenditures, and financing.
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