Most Franchise Seekers Are Gen-X, But the Future Belongs to Millennials
June 18, 2025 — Interest in franchise ownership spans all adult ages, but the most likely cohort for taking the leap is around middle age. Self-reported demographics of prospective franchise owners from January through April 2025 show that the most popular ages for exploring business ownership range from the mid-40s up to 60.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal told the story of investors who seek entrepreneurs in middle age or beyond because of their connections, credibility, industry experience, domain expertise and the kind of relationships that can take years to cultivate.
“Generation X” makes up the largest group of franchise prospects, with those 45- to 60-years old comprising 52.9% of prospects in 2025 year-to-date through April, up from 48.9% in the same period in 2021 when we did a deeper dive on demographics.
Millennials are a larger cohort in the general population than Boomers or Gen-X, and the first millennials reach age 45 in 2026.
“Baby Boomers” currently aged 61-79 made up 22.4% of franchise inquiries, and were the largest cohort in the general population until 2019, when they were overtaken by Millennials (or “Generation Y”). Millennials are a larger cohort than Boomers or Gen-X, and the first Millennials begin to reach age 45 in 2026. We began to see Millennials outpace Boomers among franchise inquiries in 2021, and the two cohorts have been neck-and-neck in monthly surveys since then.
Millennials are currently aged 29-44 and represented 21.7% of the January-April 2025 sample of aspiring franchise owners. Gen-Z (born in 1997 or later) is still growing in size, representing about 2.3% of the early 2025 sample. The youngest members of the “Silent Generation” are now 80, and that cohort represents only 0.8% of survey respondents.
This age distribution of franchise interest is supported by academic studies, as we reported back in September 2020. As recently as 2021, we were also able to append specific demographic data to franchise lead submitters, resulting in the chart below, which showed the most frequently-occurring age at 51 years old.
While we don’t know exactly why “middle age” is when most entrepreneurs take the leap, one can imagine that access to more capital, as well as confidence-building experience among older would-be entrepreneurs to be likely factors.
Age demographics for 2025 are self-reported from surveys of franchise seekers across the Franchise Ventures network of franchise directories, which provides the largest flow of franchise-investment inquiries from potential franchise buyers in the United States. For the 2021 analysis, Franchise Insights combined proprietary data from the Franchise Ventures lead generation platform with demographic data from Alliant, a leading provider of U.S. consumer audience targeting and data enrichment and predictive analytics.
Franchise Ventures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.
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Published on Wednesday, June 18th, 2025.