The Franchise Disclosure Register: a buyer's guide

The Register sits alongside the Franchising Code of Conduct 2025, the national rules that govern every franchise sold in Australia. Registration is a legal obligation on the franchisor, not a mark of quality or a government endorsement, so a brand being listed tells you it exists and has met a filing requirement, nothing more about whether it is a good investment.

• Who runs it: the Australian Government, not the franchisor or an industry body.
• What it costs you: nothing, it is free to search and open to the public.
• Who must be on it: franchisors granting or renewing franchises in Australia.
• How current it is: updated by the franchisor each year, so always check the lodgement date shown.

Each registered franchisor has a profile. The detail varies by brand, because franchisors choose how much of the optional information to publish, but you can generally expect to see the following.

• The franchisor's legal name, business details and contact information.
• Confirmation that the brand is a registered franchisor, and when it last updated its listing.
• Standard, franchisor-supplied fields you can compare across systems: an outline of the business, the term and renewal, the upfront and ongoing payments, and whether a restraint of trade applies.
• Whether the franchisor reports plans to expand its network.

FranchiseScope reads this public data where a brand has lodged it, and shows it on the brand's profile with the date it was captured. Where a franchisor has published little, there is simply less to show, and we do not fill the gap with estimates.

The Register is a starting point, not a verdict. It is important to understand its limits before you lean on it.

• It is not a rating. No one scores or ranks the franchisors on it, and inclusion is not an endorsement.
• It does not hold the full disclosure document. From 1 April 2025 the Register stopped accepting uploaded disclosure documents and earlier uploads were hidden; it shows standard fields instead, and the franchisor must give you the full document directly.
• It may be out of date between annual updates, so a fee or expansion plan shown may have moved on. Always confirm current figures with the franchisor.
• It does not show franchisee outcomes. The Key Facts Sheet that franchisors used to prepare was abolished on 1 April 2025, so you will not find one on the Register, and no Australian register publishes verified profit or survival data.

Treat the Register as the first of several checks. A sensible order looks like this.

1. Search the brand by name at franchisedisclosure.gov.au and confirm it is a registered franchisor.
2. Note the last-updated date, so you know how current the lodged information is.
3. Read what the franchisor has published: the business outline, any fees, and whether it reports plans to expand into your area.
4. Compare the fee information against category benchmarks so you know whether it is typical, using our Fee Index and the brand's own cost page.
5. Request the full disclosure document from the franchisor, which they must give you at least 14 days before you enter into the agreement.
6. Have an accountant and a franchising lawyer review the disclosure document and the agreement before you commit.

Working in that order keeps the free, public information doing what it is good at, confirming the brand and framing your questions, while the decisions that cost money rest on the documents and professional advice that come later. It also means you arrive at your first conversation with the franchisor already knowing what is registered and what is missing, which makes vague or evasive answers far easier to spot.

Buyers often confuse the two. The Register is the public shopfront; the disclosure document is the detailed file you receive once you are a serious prospect. They do different jobs.

• The Register is public and free, and shows standard, often summary-level information for every registered brand.
• The disclosure document is given to you personally by the franchisor, and sets out the fees, the franchisee list, litigation history, supplier arrangements and the estimated total investment.
• The Code gives you a disclosure period of at least 14 days with that document before you can sign, time to read it and take advice.
• After you sign, a 14-day cooling-off period lets you withdraw and have your money returned, less the franchisor's reasonable expenses.

We use the Register as a source, not a substitute for the franchisor. Our aim is to make the public data easier to search and compare, honestly.

• We show a brand's register-sourced details on its profile, dated to when we captured them.
• We never claim a brand is on the Register unless we have actually captured its listing.
• We benchmark lodged fees against category medians in the Fee Index, so a figure has context.
• Where a franchisor has published little, we say so rather than estimate, in line with our data rules.

The Register is one of the best free tools a prospective franchisee has. Use it to shortlist and sanity-check, then move to the disclosure document and professional advice for the decision itself. Checked that way, a few minutes of searching can save you weeks chasing a brand that is not actually recruiting in your state, or one whose published fees already sit well outside your budget.