How many McDonald’s restaurants are there worldwide?

How to get close to this number

Scale from a country you know. The chain has around thirteen thousand restaurants in its home market, and that market accounts for roughly a third of the global total, as this site's companion question shows. Multiply by three and you have the answer. Using a known share to scale a known quantity is the most robust method available.

The franchising detail in the explanation is what most people miss, and it changes what the company is. Around nineteen in twenty locations are run by franchisees, so the corporation's income comes largely from rent and royalties rather than from selling food — which is why it behaves like a property business. A restaurant count is a count of tenants as much as of kitchens.

The daily customer figure is the other axis: roughly seventy million people a day, which is close to one percent of humanity eating at the same chain daily. Store counts and customer counts scale differently because store size and turnover vary hugely between markets, so both figures are needed to describe the operation.