How many McDonald’s locations are there in the United States?

How to get close to this number

Work from population per restaurant. A country of a few hundred million with a restaurant roughly every twenty-five thousand people gives a figure in the low tens of thousands. Population divided by a plausible catchment is the standard method for any retail footprint question, and it works across chains and countries.

The flat trend is the interesting part. The domestic count has barely moved in a decade, which means growth now comes from remodels, delivery and overseas expansion rather than from new buildings. A saturated market stops growing by opening and starts growing by extracting more from each location — and that transition is visible in the count.

The comparison in the explanation is the useful corrective: another chain has more locations in the same country while earning far less per store. Store count and revenue rank chains completely differently, because a small franchise inside a petrol station and a standalone restaurant with a drive-through both count as one location.