1.4% of the units of the measured franchise networks are registered at a residential address, a share that reaches 6.8% in networks that declare a home-based or microfranchise format

The address complement in the CNPJ (Brazilian company registry) distinguishes, in some cases, a store or commercial office from an apartment or a house in a condominium, which makes it possible to measure how many franchise network units are registered at a residential address. Of the 57,941 active units (CNPJs) attributed to the 503 measured networks, in the reference month of October 2026, 791 (1.4%) have an apartment, a house in a condominium or a residential condominium in the complement, in 155 networks. Of this total, 285 belong to 5 networks of unattended micro markets and self-service convenience stores, a format frequently installed inside condominiums, where the residential address is the point of sale itself, and which have 772 active units. Without them, the share is 0.9%.

In the 28 networks with 30 or more active units that declare a home-based or microfranchise format on their own page, 6.8% of the 2,807 units are at a residential address, compared with 0.4% in the 244 networks that declare only other formats, excluding self-service in condominiums. The median among networks in the first group is 8.2%, and in 4 of them there is no active CNPJ at an identifiable residential address.

Excluding self-service in condominiums, the share is below 1% in 6 of the 8 segments, and, among the segments in which no network accounts for more than half of the residential units, the highest is that of services and other businesses, with 2.8%. Among the categories with a publishable number, the highest share outside self-service is that of cleaning and pest control, with 15.1%. In 18 categories, a single network accounts for more than half of the residential units, and these categories enter only the aggregate.

The count is a floor. A house outside a condominium, which may be a residence or a commercial property, is left out, and a unit located in a street-front house with no complement cannot be distinguished from a store. In the open data, the trade name is filled in for less than 0.01% of the active establishments of MEI (individual microentrepreneur regime) registrants in the same CNAE (national classification of economic activities) codes, and for that reason MEI registrants barely appear in the count by brand, although, in the same CNAE codes and with the weight of each activity in the networks, 6.7% of active MEI establishments are at an identifiable residential address, compared with 3.1% of the other establishments with a trade name and 0.6% of the network units.

How we calculate

We started from the active establishments that the observatory's census attributes to the 503 networks with at least 30 establishments in the subset, in the open CNPJ data of Receita Federal (the federal tax authority), reference month October 2026, and read the address complement of each one. A residential address is an apartment (APT, APTO, APARTAMENTO, AP followed by a number, including with a building block), a numbered house in a condominium, identified by the condominium in the complement or in the neighborhood, and a residential condominium or building. Any commercial marker prevails over the residential one (store, office room, office suite, box, kiosk, shopping, gallery, warehouse, container, commercial or business center, hotel and serviced apartment), and a floor, ground floor or story without an apartment is also left out. Lodging establishments never count as residential, because hotels and serviced apartments number their rooms as apartments. The word casa (house) without a condominium is ambiguous and was treated separately, and the 353 CNPJs in that situation (0.6%) are not included in the numerator.

We checked a random sample of 77 CNPJs classified as residential, with the full address, the activity and the set of active establishments registered at the same postal code (CEP) and number in the entire database. A CNPJ counts as confirmed when its postal code and number gather residential records in a number equal to or greater than commercial ones, with no other indication of commercial use. In 75 of them the address corresponds to a residential unit, a precision of 97.4% (95% interval from 91.0% to 99.3%), and of 96.2% in the 53 cases outside self-service in condominiums. Uncertain cases count as errors.

The declared format is the one the network reports on its own franchise page, in the offer census that also feeds the indicator of franchise formats, with pages read from October 30 to November 8, 2026 (375 on the first day and 15 on the last, among the networks in the comparison). That indicator counts the networks that declare each format, and this one counts units through the registry. The comparison includes only networks with 30 or more measured active units and is published only by group. The comparison with MEI uses all active establishments in the database in the same CNAE codes, excluding those attributed to the networks, with each CNAE code weighted by the number of network units in it, and only the 109 CNAE codes with at least 20 establishments of MEI registrants, of companies with a trade name and of companies without a trade name, which account for 78.7% of the network units outside self-service in condominiums.

Calculated on November 8, 2026. Method version 1.0. Sample: 57,941 active units (CNPJs) of 503 measured networks, reference month October 2026.

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