Get our free one-page cheat sheet of pizzeria cost benchmarks: food, labor, rent and delivery, with a blank for your own numbers.
American pizza is a roughly $50 billion business that has stopped growing — and started redistributing. PMQ’s Pizza Power Report 2026 counts 75,736 US pizzerias generating an estimated $49.6 billion in 2025, down 0.3%. IBISWorld sizes 2026 at $50.4 billion, up 2.0% after a five-year decline. Call it flat. What’s not flat is who’s winning inside it.
The chains are stalling
Technomic’s Top 500 data shows QSR pizza chain sales went negative in 2025 — down 0.3% to about $31 billion. Inside that number, the spread is brutal: Domino’s grew 4.8% while Pizza Hut fell 8.2% and MOD Pizza dropped 10.6%. The 2024 scoreboard from PMQ/Datassential tells the same story: Domino’s $9.5B (+5.3%) and Little Caesars $4.93B (+11.5%) winning on value and digital, Papa Johns (-4.1%) and Pizza Hut (-1.5%) losing altitude. Even the winner is grinding — Domino’s US same-store sales rose just 0.1% in Q2 2026.
The independents are not
More than half of US pizzerias are independents, and the platform data points up: indie shops on Slice saw 20% year-over-year order growth, with top-quartile shops averaging $658,548 in annual sales. Slice’s CRO went as far as declaring “the era of the chains is over” as its network passed 15,000 shops. Discount the source — Slice sells to independents — but the direction matches what Technomic sees from the other side.
And the failure-rate myth deserves burial: Datassential tracked 1,000+ newly opened pizza shops and found only 2 closed within their first 12 months.
In a flat category, growth is a market-share fight. The chains are fighting each other with discounts. The independents are quietly taking the neighborhood.
Demand is fine — economics are the fight
Nobody stopped eating pizza: 86% of Americans ate pizza or flatbread in the past year, and 40% of Gen Z eats it weekly. The squeeze is on the cost side. The National Restaurant Association’s 2026 outlook forecasts $1.55 trillion in industry sales but notes 42% of operators say their restaurants are not profitable, with more than 90% citing food, labor, insurance, energy, and swipe fees as significant challenges.
Free cheat sheet: 15 pizzeria cost benchmarks on one page
Prime cost, labor, delivery and rent, each with its source and a blank for your shop’s number. Enter your email and the download opens right away.
You’ll also get the Oven Scars newsletter. We never sell or share your address.
Caveat worth stating: market sizing differs by methodology — PMQ/Datassential and IBISWorld disagree by nearly a billion dollars on the same industry. Directional trends across sources are trustworthy; single decimal points are not.
