Weekly Opening Trends: March 2020 – Late 2024
What the Data Shows: Three Key Restaurant Opening Trends
This analysis tracks U.S. restaurant development activity from March 2020 through late 2024, covering approximately 4.5 years of weekly legal-filing and verified-opening data. The period begins with the pandemic shutdown and follows the subsequent recovery and stabilization of new restaurant activity.
Key headline: RestaurantData.com recorded an average of approximately 531 verified new restaurant openings per week across the full tracked period. Recent weekly totals generally ranged from 300 to 550 openings, with many locations identified before opening.
Key Trend Observations
Verified restaurant openings recovered and settled into a sustained weekly range. New restaurant activity dropped sharply during the initial 2020 shutdown and then recovered through 2021. Weekly opening totals subsequently stabilized, with periodic peaks and recent activity often reaching the upper end of the 300-to-550 range.
DBA and business-formation filings remained more volatile than verified openings. DBA registrations, incorporations, and LLC filings fluctuated considerably from week to week. These records reflect early business activity, but not every filing represents a restaurant that will move forward as a new location.
Alcohol-permit activity was comparatively steady. Combined alcohol filings showed less variation than DBA, incorporation, construction, and other raw records. This consistency indicates a continuing base of full-service restaurant, bar, and alcohol-serving concept development throughout the tracked period.
RestaurantData organizes verified restaurant locations, concepts, franchise relationships, operating companies, and parent organizations within Atlas by RestaurantData . This connected structure helps distinguish a genuinely new restaurant location from an existing unit, ownership transfer, duplicate filing, renamed concept, or administrative change.
Weekly Restaurant Opening Trends: March 2020 Through Late 2024
The charts associated with this analysis track weekly activity across five measures: DBA filings, incorporation and LLC formations, combined alcohol permits, total raw filings, and verified net new restaurant openings. The series begins with the week the pandemic shutdown started and continues through the end of the tracked period.
These measures represent different stages of restaurant development. A corporate registration or DBA filing may appear when an operator is establishing a legal identity, while an alcohol application or construction permit may indicate that a physical restaurant project has moved further into licensing or development. A verified opening reflects the later stage at which RestaurantData can connect the activity to an identifiable restaurant location.
How the Restaurant Filing Categories Compare
DBA filings and incorporations and LLCs: Both categories fluctuated throughout the period. Incorporation and LLC formations generally displayed greater week-to-week variation, reflecting the uneven pace of new business-entity formation following the 2020 shutdown.
Combined alcohol permits and total raw filings: Alcohol-permit filings remained relatively steady, while total raw filings showed a much wider range. The raw total includes several filing categories and is affected by shifts in construction permits, DBA activity, business formations, reporting schedules, and source availability across individual markets.
Verified net new restaurant openings: Verified openings followed a more stable pattern than the underlying raw filings. RestaurantData removes duplicates, checks records against existing restaurant and chain-location data, and verifies that each retained record represents identifiable restaurant activity.
Current company development is evaluated separately through the Expansion Pressure Index™ . That business-prioritization model organizes recent verified expansion activity across growing restaurant companies and helps distinguish sustained development from isolated announcements or individual filings.
Summary Statistics: Weekly Averages Since March 2020
The table below summarizes the weekly average, minimum, and maximum for each tracked measure across the full 4.5-year period.
| Metric | Weekly Average | Weekly Minimum | Weekly Maximum | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DBA Filings | ~452 | 113 | 1,108 | Considerable week-to-week variation |
| Incorporations and LLCs | ~439 | 84 | 1,152 | Greater variation than DBA filings |
| Combined Alcohol Permits | ~178 | 57 | 400 | Comparatively steady throughout the period |
| Total Raw Filings* | ~1,067 | 308 | 2,166 | Pre-vetting aggregate of all tracked filing types |
| Net New Restaurant Openings | ~531 | 265 | 870 | More stable than the underlying raw filing totals |
* Total Raw represents the pre-vetted aggregate of legal and development records, including DBAs, LLCs, state incorporations, alcohol filings, and building permits. Net New Restaurant Openings reflects the verified weekly count after RestaurantData removes duplicates, checks records against existing chain locations and headquarters data, and validates the location and restaurant activity.
From Raw Filings to Verified Restaurant Openings
Raw filing totals are consistently higher than verified-opening totals because a filing alone does not establish that a new restaurant location is moving forward. Some records are duplicates, administrative changes, unrelated businesses, abandoned projects, ownership transfers, or filings connected to an existing location.
RestaurantData reviews DBA registrations, incorporation and LLC records, alcohol applications, building permits, planning records, company announcements, and other development sources. Records are de-duplicated, matched against existing restaurant and chain-location data, assigned to the correct geography, and retained when they represent identifiable restaurant opening activity.
The verification process also considers company scale and organizational structure. A filing associated with a single independent restaurant is evaluated differently from an opening connected to a large franchisee, regional operating group, multi-concept company, or national restaurant organization.
Larger companies, franchise organizations, multi-concept operators, and enterprise ownership groups are examined through the Restaurant Enterprise Index™ . The index generally covers organizations responsible for 100 or more restaurant units and provides a company-level view that is separate from the individual location and brand-opening records used in this historical analysis.
Why Legal Filings and Verified Openings Differ
Legal and development records measure intent and activity at different points in the restaurant-development process. An LLC may be created months before a site is selected, while an alcohol application may be submitted after a lease has been signed and construction has begun. A building permit may apply to an existing restaurant renovation rather than a new establishment.
Records can also refer to the same project under different names. A restaurant concept, holding company, property owner, franchisee, and liquor-license applicant may each appear separately in public records. Connecting these records requires matching addresses, legal entities, operators, concepts, brands, and ownership relationships.
This is why RestaurantData does not treat raw filing volume as equivalent to completed restaurant openings. Raw records are research inputs. Verified openings are the result of de-duplication, classification, company matching, location review, and continuing verification.
Related Restaurant Opening and Company Research
Readers seeking additional detail about when projects are identified can review the Pre-Opening Restaurant Leads FAQ , which explains the legal and development sources RestaurantData follows, the timing of early signals, the information included with each record, and the verification process used before distribution.
Full-year comparisons are available through the 2024 U.S. New Restaurant Openings Report and the 2025 U.S. New Restaurant Openings Report . These reports provide annual views of opening activity by geography, cuisine, service format, location type, and operator-size category.
The Restaurant Opening Cross-Tab Analysis for 2020–2025 extends the historical comparison across geography, ownership type, service format, location type, and filing source. Current brand and operator activity is also reported through RestaurantData’s new restaurant brand and expansion signals .
Restaurant franchise systems represent one part of the broader opening market. For readers examining company-level franchise scale, RestaurantData’s Top 100 Restaurant Franchisors research provides a separate view of major franchisor organizations, their restaurant concepts, franchise networks, unit structures, and broader company relationships. It is included here as supporting franchise research rather than as a direct measure of total U.S. restaurant-opening activity.
The RestaurantData Research Center brings together the company’s original work on new restaurant openings, development signals, restaurant companies, franchise systems, multi-concept operators, ownership changes, executive movement, expansion activity, and the structure of the U.S. restaurant market.
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Preferred citation: Source: RestaurantData.com, U.S. Weekly Restaurant Opening Trends, March 2020–Late 2024.