Here’s What’s Really Happening!
On February 13, 2026, Wendy’s interim CEO and CFO Ken Cook stood before investors and delivered a number that reframed the entire conversation around the brand’s future: between 298 and 358 U.S. restaurants would close in the first half of the year.
That figure, representing 5% to 6% of a domestic system that counted 5,969 locations at the close of 2025, made Wendy’s closing locations the most consequential fast food story of the year.
It did not come without context. Wendy’s had already shuttered 240 restaurants through 2024 and 28 more in Q4 2025 alone. But the Q4 earnings call announcement formalized what had been a slow bleed into a declared strategy. Ken Cook called 2026 a “rebuilding year.” The word choice was deliberate and, for a corporate earnings call, unusually direct.
How Many Wendy’s Locations Are Closing in 2026?
How many Wendy’s locations are closing in 2026? The official range is 298 to 358 locations, targeted for closure by the end of June 2026. Against a baseline of 5,969 domestic restaurants, that represents the largest single-year contraction in the chain’s modern history.
For scale: several U.S. states have fewer total Wendy’s restaurants than the number slated to close this year. The closures span markets across the country, though Wendy’s has not released a state-by-state or city-by-city breakdown.
Wendy’s restaurant closures 2026 follow a multi-year pattern of network contraction. The 2024 closures were framed at the time as routine pruning. The Q4 2025 closures signaled acceleration. What the February 2026 announcement confirmed is that neither round was sufficient, and that the company’s assessment of its own underperformance had grown significantly more serious.
Cook made clear that the process is being executed store by store, in direct partnership with the franchise operators who own and run each location. Wendy’s, like most major fast food chains, operates primarily through a franchise model. Corporate does not unilaterally close a location; it works with each franchisee to evaluate the restaurant’s financial history, local market dynamics, and long-term viability before reaching a closure decision. That collaborative structure means the timeline is not uniform across all markets, and the final number within the projected range will depend on how individual franchise negotiations conclude.
Why is Wendy’s Closing Restaurants?
The financial data reported during the Q4 earnings call announcement explains the scale of the response. U.S. same-store sales fell 11.3% in Q4 2025 compared to the same period the prior year. Total revenue for the quarter landed at $543 million, a 5.5% year-over-year decline. Global systemwide sales dropped 8.3% for Q4 and 3.5% for the full calendar year 2025.
The reason Wendy’s is closing its restaurants. Cook identified a specific strategic misstep as a primary driver: the company leaned too hard into limited-time promotional pricing during 2025, offering periodic discount deals rather than building a consistent, permanent value structure. The method created temporary customer increases but did not succeed at turning those customers into dedicated clients. The business lost customers as soon as the discounts stopped and those customers failed to return.
The company also operated within a difficult industry environment. The fast food industry slowdown that began accelerating in 2024 has affected virtually every major chain. McDonald’s, Burger King, and others have reported softening sales as consumers, still adjusting to elevated food prices, make more deliberate decisions about discretionary spending. The fast food industry slowdown has hit the burger category with particular force, a segment where price sensitivity is high, product differentiation is narrow, and customers have numerous alternatives within the same price band.
Declining restaurant sales create a structural problem at the location level that goes beyond revenue. Lower customer volume reduces the ability to justify full staffing, maintain equipment, and service franchise fees and lease obligations. Declining restaurant sales at underperforming Wendy’s locations that were already operating below system averages created a feedback loop: reduced revenue meant reduced reinvestment, which meant a degraded customer experience, which meant further reduced revenue. Closing those locations ends the cycle. It does not fix the underlying causes, but it removes the drag on the broader system.
What is Wendy’s Project Fresh Plan?
Wendy’s Project Fresh plan was formally announced in October 2025, several months before the scale of the 2026 closures became public. It functions as the overarching framework for the company’s turnaround, not just a closure program, but a complete reassessment of how Wendy’s competes, communicates, and serves customers.
Wendy’s Project Fresh plan is organized around three operational priorities. First, accelerate the removal of underperforming Wendy’s locations that represent structural liabilities rather than recoverable assets. Second, direct capital investment toward restaurants with demonstrated local market strength that need modernization to reach their potential. Third, rebuild consumer demand through a combination of permanent value offerings, menu innovation, and a media strategy weighted more heavily toward streaming and digital platforms, where younger customers are concentrated.
“We’re executing Project Fresh with urgency to strengthen our foundation and position Wendy’s for long-term success,” Cook said on the earnings call.
The most concrete early output of this restaurant turnaround strategy is the January 2026 launch of a permanent Biggie Deals value menu. The structure is straightforward: $4 Biggie Bites, $6 Biggie Bags, and $8 Biggie Bundles. Unlike the promotional pricing that preceded it, this menu is permanent, it is designed to function as a baseline expectation rather than a time-limited incentive. The distinction matters because permanent value creates a reason to return on any given day, while promotional value creates a reason to visit once.
Additional menu innovation is also built into the restaurant turnaround strategy. A new chicken sandwich and a “cheesy bacon cheeseburger” are expected to launch through 2026. These items are intended to address a specific gap: Wendy’s has historically underperformed in the chicken segment relative to its overall market position, and the chicken sandwich category remains among the highest-growth areas in quick-service dining.
Which Wendy’s Locations Are Closing in the U.S.?
Which Wendy’s locations are closing in the US? Wendy’s has not published a list, and as of this writing, no location-specific closure schedule has been made available to the public. A company spokesperson confirmed to media outlets that closures are focused on “consistently underperforming restaurants,” but declined to identify locations by name or address.
Franchise systems of this nature typically operate without maintaining public closure lists. Companies maintain closure lists as confidential information because individual franchise agreements and ongoing negotiations and legal matters make these decisions too complex to share publically. Restaurants and customers together with community stakeholders discover restaurant closures through local news and official restaurant notices and changes in restaurant operating hours.
Wendy’s underperforming restaurants demonstrate common traits which assist in predicting which locations will experience increased operational challenges. The first group of candidates includes restaurants which have experienced persistent same-store sales declines across multiple quarters while the second group includes restaurants which need expensive renovations to their current facilities and the third group includes restaurants which operate in markets where their competitive landscape has undergone fundamental changes. The most convincing situation for restaurant shutdown occurs when a restaurant fulfills all operational requirements for multiple restaurant categories.
How many Wendy’s locations are closing in 2026 is bounded by the 298 to 358 range Cook provided, but the final number within that range remains contingent on franchise negotiations. Cook noted that international operations are performing better than domestic, which contextualizes the U.S. closures as a market-specific problem rather than a signal of systemic brand weakness.
The Franchise and Workforce Dimensions
Wendy’s closing locations at this scale has direct financial and employment consequences that corporate communications tend to address in general terms. The specifics deserve more attention.
On the franchise side, the franchise profitability strategy Wendy’s is executing operates on the premise that a smaller, healthier system delivers better returns for remaining operators than a larger system burdened by underperforming units. A struggling restaurant in the same market can suppress average performance metrics, dilute brand perception, and create operational pressure across the local franchise group. Removing it, in theory, creates a cleaner environment for the restaurants that remain.
The franchise profitability strategy also includes a capital investment component directed at viable locations. Wendy’s has indicated plans to fund restaurant renovations and equipment upgrades at locations that have the customer base to justify the investment but lack the capital to self-fund modernization. This represents an attempt to prevent the same deterioration cycle from recurring in the next tier of restaurants.
Wendy’s restaurant closures 2026 will directly affect thousands of restaurant employees. Hourly workers at closed locations are not guaranteed positions at nearby restaurants, and outcomes will vary substantially based on local labor market conditions, the decisions of individual franchise operators, and whether surrounding locations have operational capacity to absorb additional staff. Corporate-level statements about transition support exist, but the practical execution of those commitments happens at the franchise level, where accountability and resources differ significantly from operator to operator.
Industry Context: Where Wendy’s Sits in a Broader Trend
Wendy’s closing locations at this volume is most accurately understood as an acute expression of pressures affecting the entire quick-service restaurant sector. The fast food industry slowdown of 2024 and 2025 was not confined to Wendy’s. McDonald’s reported same-store sales declines in the U.S. for multiple consecutive quarters. Burger King’s parent company, Restaurant Brands International, has undertaken its own restructuring. Smaller chains have faced even steeper headwinds.
Consumer behavior shifted in ways that proved durable. Post-pandemic inflation elevated grocery prices significantly, but fast food prices rose at a comparable or faster rate, narrowing the value gap that had historically driven traffic. Customers who once viewed a quick-service meal as a convenient and affordable option began calculating its cost against alternatives, grocery store prepared foods, meal delivery, cooking at home — and found the equation less favorable. Declining restaurant sales across the sector reflected this recalibration.
For Wendy’s specifically, the impact was compounded by the promotional pricing strategy that created artificial traffic patterns without building sustainable consumer habits. Wendy’s restaurant closures 2026 are partly a correction for that compounded error. The chain ran a promotional strategy that worked short-term and failed long-term, and the underperforming Wendy’s locations that bore the brunt of the traffic loss had the least capacity to absorb it.
What the Data Suggests About Recovery
The restaurant turnaround strategy Wendy’s is executing has historical precedents in the quick-service sector, though outcomes have varied considerably based on execution. Chains that have successfully contracted and rebuilt typically share certain characteristics: a clear and permanent value proposition, meaningful menu differentiation, consistent restaurant-level quality, and a media strategy that reaches the target customer effectively.
Wendy’s Project Fresh plan addresses each of these dimensions, at least at the level of stated strategy. The permanent Biggie Deals menu resolves the value consistency problem. Menu innovation addresses differentiation. Capital investment in surviving locations targets restaurant quality. The shift toward streaming and digital advertising reflects where the primary customer demographic actually consumes media.
Whether the strategy produces the intended results depends on execution quality, competitive response, and consumer behavior, variables that no restructuring plan fully controls. Why is Wendy’s closing restaurants at this pace rather than a slower one? The company’s own assessment is that the cost of delay, in terms of continued losses at underperforming Wendy’s locations and continued erosion of brand perception, outweighs the disruption of a faster, larger closure program.
International performance provides one genuinely positive data point. Wendy’s restaurant closures 2026 are a domestic story. The brand’s global markets are reportedly growing, which preserves the company’s ability to pursue international expansion as a growth lever even as it contracts domestically. That dynamic gives investors and franchise partners a reason to remain engaged with the brand’s long-term trajectory.
What Comes After the Closures
When Wendy’s closing locations reaches its projected endpoint, somewhere between 298 and 358 domestic restaurants shuttered, the resulting system will be smaller, more concentrated in markets where the brand demonstrates genuine strength, and operating with fewer of the structural liabilities that have suppressed system-wide performance.
The Biggie Deals value menu and the incoming menu additions are the demand-side components of the recovery plan. Both need to work. A leaner franchise network creates the operational conditions for improvement; it does not guarantee that customers return. The chicken sandwich launch in particular carries significant strategic weight, Wendy’s has long maintained a strong reputation for its beef products, but the chicken segment is where growth in quick-service dining is currently concentrated, and underperforming Wendy’s locations in markets dominated by Chick-fil-A and Popeyes have demonstrated how much the gap costs in real sales.
Wendy’s Project Fresh plan sets 2026 as the floor. The stated goal is stabilization this year and growth in 2027 and beyond. Whether that timeline holds will become clearer in subsequent earnings calls, as same-store sales data from the remaining domestic network reflects whether the restructuring is producing the intended effect.
The Q4 earnings call announcement established the scope of the problem clearly. The closures themselves will establish whether the response was correctly calibrated. For the communities, franchise owners, employees, and customers directly affected by specific restaurant shutdowns, the outcome of that larger calculation is secondary to the immediate disruption, which is real, regardless of where the long-term trajectory lands.
Wendy’s restaurant closures 2026 are, at their core, the visible consequence of decisions made over several years catching up with a brand that operated too long on assumptions that no longer held. The restructuring is the company’s attempt to build from a more honest starting point. What it builds from there is the question that matters most.
