Resources
Research, from the data underneath
We keep a franchise fee database because the engine needs one: a brand cost typed in by hand is a brand cost nobody can check. What we publish here comes out of that same data, read from filed documents rather than gathered from a survey.
White paper
The 2026 Hotel Franchise Fee Guide
What a brand actually costs on rooms revenue, across 147 currently offered US brands and 12 franchisors, parsed from their 2026 franchise disclosure documents. The distribution of royalties and program fees, the spread by chain scale, the four fee structures that break a simple comparison, and why loyalty must not be added to the total.
More to come
The same database answers questions about PIP scheduling, fee relief and how filed rates move between vintages. Those are next. If one of them is what you are actually trying to answer, tell us — it moves up the list.
How to read anything we publish
Two rules govern this page. Every number traces to a document you could pull yourself, and where the data cannot support a figure we leave it out rather than model it. A gap that is visible can be filled; a gap that has been quietly estimated cannot be found again.
The underwriting standards the engine holds to are set out in Scope, which is worth reading before the research: it says what PATL covers today and, more usefully, what it does not.