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.
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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.
