McDonald's US sales growth stalls to 0.8% as guest counts fall — and only two-thirds of its restaurants priced the value menu right
McDonald's is running the biggest affordability campaign it has attempted in a decade, and by its own chief executive's account only 60 to 65 per cent of its restaurants priced it the way head office asked. US comparable sales slowed to 0.8 per cent, guest counts fell again, and July was negative. An analysis of a company whose landlord economics keep working long after its customers stop showing up.
Every figure in this article is drawn from McDonald's quarterly earnings releases, its 2025 Form 10-K and its official call transcript, or from CNBC, Fortune, Restaurant Dive and QSR as attributed. Sections marked as analysis are identified as such.
Asked on the August earnings call what had gone wrong in the United States, Chris Kempczinski gave an answer that was simultaneously a defence and a confession: "We don't have a strategy problem, we simply didn't execute at the level we needed to in the second quarter."
The strategy in question is the largest affordability push McDonald's has attempted in a decade. The execution problem, by the company's own accounting, is that somewhere between a third and 40 per cent of its restaurants did not put the prices on the menu board that head office had asked for.
The quarter
US comparable sales rose 0.8 per cent — down from 2.5 per cent in the same quarter a year earlier, and down from 3.9 per cent three months before. Global comparable sales rose 1.3 per cent against 3.8 per cent a year ago, and every segment decelerated.
The financial results were fine, which is the point. Revenue of $7.1 billion rose 4 per cent, operating income 3 per cent, net income 5 per cent to $2.36 billion. Diluted earnings of $3.32 a share were up 6 per cent, $3.38 excluding six cents of restructuring charges booked under the company's "Accelerating the Organization" programme. Earnings beat the consensus; revenue missed it by about $30 million. The shares rose roughly 2 per cent.
The disclosure that matters sits one line below the headline: US comparable sales were driven by higher average check, including favourable product mix, partly offset by negative comparable guest counts. Fewer people came in. The ones who did spent more, and that was enough to keep the number positive.
| Comparable sales | 2024 | 2025 | Q1 2026 | Q2 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. | +0.2% | +2.1% | +3.9% | +0.8% |
| International Operated | -0.2% | +3.2% | +3.9% | +1.5% |
| Developmental Licensed | -0.3% | +4.6% | +3.4% | +1.9% |
| Total company | -0.1% | +3.1% | +3.8% | +1.3% |
What "didn't execute" actually means
McDonald's spent the first half of 2026 rebuilding its value proposition in public. A simplified McValue menu with ten items at $3 or less launched in April, alongside $4 breakfast bundles and the $5 and $6 meal deals held over from the previous campaign. Snack Wraps returned at $2.99 after a nine-year absence, and management said nearly one in five customers bought one during the launch window.
Then Kempczinski told analysts what had happened to the pricing architecture underneath it. Only "60 per cent to 65 per cent of our system" had implemented the recommended everyday-affordable-price structure correctly. And of the centrepiece: "The 10 items for under three bucks has not delivered against our expectation."
The second wound was self-inflicted in a different way. The system, he said, "pulled off of a lot of digital offers" and discontinued its Buy One, Add One promotion — "a bad trade" that damaged engagement among exactly the customers who use the app most. Chief financial officer Ian Borden called digital offers "core to kind of our loyalty program." Management attributed roughly two-thirds of the US shortfall to value execution, and the remainder to a June marketing programme built around the FIFA World Cup that underperformed.
We will not get beaten on value. — Ian Borden, chief financial officer
Analysis: the discount costs the franchisee, not the landlord
There is a structural reason a price recommendation stays a recommendation. At the end of 2025 McDonald's operated 45,356 restaurants, approximately 95 per cent of them franchised — including 95 per cent of the 13,706 in the United States. Corporate can design a value menu, market it, and put it in a Super Bowl advertisement. It cannot set the price at a restaurant it does not own.
And the two parties do not feel a discount the same way. McDonald's collects rent plus a royalty calculated as a percentage of franchisee sales. A franchisee selling a $3 item absorbs the food, labour and margin compression; the parent's royalty simply scales with whatever the ticket ends up being. Cutting price to defend traffic is, for the operator, a direct hit to profit, and for the landlord, close to neutral.
The 2025 accounts show the resulting asymmetry plainly. Franchised revenue of $16.5 billion rose 5 per cent while sales at company-operated restaurants of $9.7 billion fell 1 per cent. Franchised margins contributed $13.9 billion; the restaurants McDonald's actually runs contributed $1.4 billion. Operating income was $12.4 billion on $26.9 billion of revenue — a 46 per cent operating margin that belongs to a property company, not a hamburger chain.
The traffic problem is older than this quarter
Read the comparable-sales line backwards and the pattern is not two bad months. US comps grew 8.7 per cent in 2023, then 0.2 per cent in 2024, then 2.1 per cent in 2025 — a figure the 10-K attributes to "average check growth." First-quarter 2026's 3.9 per cent was, in the company's own words, "primarily driven by positive check growth." That is three consecutive years in which the largest restaurant company in the world grew its US business on price and mix rather than on customers.
The macro backdrop is real and management has been consistent about it. It warned in May that fuel costs and consumer anxiety over the conflict with Iran could dent sales; the US average price of regular gasoline peaked on 21 May at $4.56 a gallon. Lower-income households, the demographic that historically made McDonald's counter-cyclical, have been trading down or trading out for the better part of two years.
Borden's most consequential sentence on the call was about the quarter that had already started: US comparable sales were "slightly negative in July."
What management is doing about it
On the morning of the results, McDonald's replaced the head of its largest market. Skye Anderson, a 26-year veteran most recently chief operating officer of the US business, became president of McDonald's USA effective 4 August, taking responsibility for nearly 14,000 restaurants. Joe Erlinger, who had run the US for nearly seven years, moves to an advisory role until early 2027.
Anderson's qualification is operational rather than strategic, which fits the diagnosis. Over four years running the US West Zone she modernised more than 5,700 restaurants, delivered comparable sales growth above 30 per cent and added roughly $100,000 to average restaurant cash flow — which is to say, she has a record of persuading franchisees that head office's plan makes them money. Kempczinski's statement noted that she "combines deep operational discipline with strong financial judgment."
The one initiative aimed squarely at guest counts rather than average check is beverages. CosMc's, the standalone drinks concept, was closed in 2025 and its findings folded back into McCafé; crafted sodas and refreshers rolled out across the US this year, with energy drinks following from August. Kempczinski said results were "better than expected", with strong food attachment and traffic in dayparts McDonald's has never owned.
Loyalty is the other lever, and on its own terms it works: trailing twelve-month systemwide sales to loyalty members reached $40 billion, up 20 per cent across 70 markets, with 90-day active users up 13 per cent to about 220 million.
And underneath everything, the build continues. McDonald's plans roughly 2,100 net new restaurants in 2026 on the way to 50,000 units by the end of 2027 — an expansion its own 10-K describes as the fastest period of unit growth in company history.
Analysis: a model that works whether or not the customers do
Put the pieces together and the shape of the company is clear. Systemwide sales reached $139.4 billion in 2025; revenue, operating income and earnings per share all rose again in the second quarter of 2026. None of that required a single additional customer, because growth is being manufactured from three sources indifferent to footfall: more restaurants, higher average checks, and a royalty that takes its percentage either way.
This is not an accident or a failure — it is the model working exactly as designed, and it can absorb a great deal of weakness before it shows up in the parent's earnings. But comparable sales are the number that eventually tells the truth, and comparable sales are ultimately guest counts plus price. Price has been doing the work for three years. July was negative.
Kempczinski's distinction between strategy and execution is defensible on the facts. It is also the harder of the two problems. A strategy can be changed in a boardroom; execution here means convincing roughly 14,000 independently owned American restaurants to accept thinner margins on food in order to protect a traffic line whose benefit accrues most reliably to the company collecting the rent. That is a negotiation, not a decision — and it is now Skye Anderson's.
The company that famously sells hamburgers in order to sell real estate has spent two years demonstrating how well the real estate holds up when the hamburgers slow down. It holds up very well. That is the reassurance in these results, and it is also the warning.