Best STEM Franchises: 2026 FDD Data & Item 19 Analysis
Important note — please read before using this guide. The financial, fee, and outlet figures in this article are drawn from the most recent Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDDs) available at the time of writing — primarily 2026 registration-year filings, with one 2025 filing (Mad Science, fiscal year ended 3/31/2025). FDDs are re-filed by franchisors every year, so newer numbers may be available by the time you read this. We feature only STEM franchises that make a Financial Performance Representation in Item 19 of their FDD — the brands that voluntarily disclose how their franchisees actually perform — because we believe earnings transparency is essential to an informed decision; brands that do not disclose financial performance are not included in this guide. This guide is editorial research and industry commentary — it is not financial, legal, tax, or investment advice and should not be treated as a recommendation to invest in any particular franchise. Always pull the current FDD for any brand you are seriously considering, and work with a qualified franchise attorney and an independent financial advisor before signing any franchise agreement.
Parents will pay for coding, robotics, and hands-on science. That much the market has settled. What the market has not settled is what a STEM franchise is actually worth to the person who buys one — and on that question, the FDDs are far more candid than the brochures.
Six STEM franchisors disclose franchisee earnings in Item 19 of their FDD. We read all six. The most important thing in those filings is not the averages that get quoted in press releases. It is the quartile data — the franchisors' own breakdown of what their best and worst franchisees earned. Those tables tell a story that a single headline number cannot: in this industry, the gap between a top-quartile operator and a bottom-quartile operator is not 20% or 30%. In some brands it is ten times.
STEM franchising splits into two business models that do not compare to one another, and treating them as a single category is how buyers get hurt. We have kept them separate throughout.
A note on our method. Every figure in this guide is quoted directly from the brand's own FDD — Item 5 (initial fees), Item 6 (ongoing fees), Item 7 (investment), Item 19 (financial performance) and Item 20 (outlet counts). Where a franchisor reports its results only as a detailed multi-table breakdown — as Challenge Island and Mad Science both do, slicing results by territory count and by percentile — we have summarised the tables most useful for comparison; those detailed tables best reviewed in the original document are flagged as such rather than flattened into a single number. We would rather present a narrower set of figures we can stand behind than a tidy number the franchisor never actually published. Where a brand discloses no system-wide median, we say so instead of calculating one.
Two brands that describe themselves as STEM did not make this guide. Little Medical School makes no Financial Performance Representation at all — its Item 19 states plainly that it does not make representations about franchisee financial performance. Stemtree does publish an Item 19, but it is an income statement for a single company-owned center that has been open since 2014 — no franchisee data whatsoever. Neither meets our disclosure bar.
If your interest is broader than STEM — tutoring, test prep, or early childhood education — our guide to education franchises covers that ground, and Code Ninjas appears in both.
| Brand | Model | Initial Fee | Royalty | Total Investment | FPR? | Item 19 Highlight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| iCode | Fixed location | $40,000 | 8% | $296,000–$446,500 | Yes | 37 schools, by quartile: top-quartile median $444,413; bottom-quartile median $153,947 |
| Code Ninjas | Fixed location | $45,000 | 8.25% | $174,250–$265,750 | Yes | 224 Centers: median gross sales $217,479 (average $237,614); top-quartile median $352,030, bottom-quartile median $127,214 |
| Mad Science | Mobile / in-school | $49,000 | 8% | $132,331–$191,959 | Yes | Median gross revenue $323,000 per territory (57 territories); single-territory franchisees median $436,000 (24 franchisees) |
| Bricks 4 Kidz | Mobile / Creativity Center | $23,000–$25,000 | 7% | $34,200–$110,550 | Yes | Median gross revenue $72,503 (average $101,813); top 25% averaged $242,104; lowest reported nil |
| Snapology | Mobile only | $40,000 | 7% | $74,950–$105,600 | Yes | By quartile: top-quartile median $185,154; bottom-quartile median $18,451. Franchisor publishes quartiles only |
| Challenge Island | Mobile / in-school | $49,900 | 7% | $58,465–$74,050 | Yes | Median gross revenue $57,246 per full-time franchisee (50 franchisees); $42,021 per territory |
All six brands make a Financial Performance Representation — that is our criterion for inclusion. Figures are taken directly from each brand's Item 5, Item 6, Item 7 and Item 19 disclosures. Mad Science's figures are from its 2025 FDD (fiscal year ended 3/31/2025); the other five are from 2026 FDDs.
Five of the six brands break their franchisee results into quartiles. This is the most valuable disclosure in any of these documents, and it is the part almost nobody reads. Here is what happens when you line the quartiles up.
| Brand | Model | Top-quartile median | Bottom-quartile median | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Code Ninjas | Fixed | $352,030 | $127,214 | 2.8× |
| iCode | Fixed | $444,413 | $153,947 | 2.9× |
| Mad Science | Mobile | $736,000 | $182,000 | 4.0× |
| Challenge Island | Mobile | $179,143 | $20,552 | 8.7× |
| Snapology | Mobile | $185,154 | $18,451 | 10.0× |
Mad Science's quartiles are drawn from its single-territory franchisee table (24 franchisees), the cleanest like-for-like group in that filing. Bricks 4 Kidz does not publish full quartiles and is therefore omitted from this table.
The pattern is consistent and it is not subtle. A STEM franchise with a lease, a build-out, and a schedule of enrolled students produces outcomes that land within a relatively narrow band — roughly a three-fold spread from the bottom quartile to the top. A mobile territory produces outcomes that range from a genuine business to something that is barely a job.
This makes intuitive sense once you see it. A physical center has a catchment area, a recurring subscription base, and fixed capacity — it is hard to do spectacularly and hard to do catastrophically. A mobile enrichment territory has almost no structural floor: revenue is a direct function of how many school contracts, camps, and parties the owner personally goes out and books. The franchise supplies the curriculum and the brand. It cannot supply the hustle.
Prospective buyers naturally read the top quartile and imagine themselves in it. The more useful exercise is to read the bottom quartile and ask whether you could survive there.
Snapology's bottom quartile — 14 of its 53 full-time franchisees — had a median gross revenue of $18,451 for the year. Not profit. Revenue. Its lowest reporting franchisee recorded $2,289. Bricks 4 Kidz's lowest US franchisee reported no revenue at all, and the franchisor is candid about why: some franchises operated only part of the year, launched late, or were simply inactive. Challenge Island's bottom quartile — 13 franchisees — had a median of $20,552.
These are not obscure outliers buried in a footnote. They are a full quarter of each system, disclosed by the franchisor in its own filing.
Here is where the quartile data stops being an abstraction. Every mobile brand in this guide charges a royalty of the greater of a percentage of sales or a fixed monthly minimum. For a strong operator, the percentage governs and the minimum is irrelevant. For a weak one, the minimum becomes the whole story.
Run the arithmetic on a bottom-quartile Snapology franchisee earning the disclosed median of $18,451:
The same structure appears at Challenge Island: a $400/month minimum royalty in years one through three, rising to $500/month thereafter, plus a $150/month minimum marketing contribution and a further $500 per quarter of required local marketing spend. Against that brand's bottom-quartile median of $20,552, the fixed obligations alone consume close to half of gross revenue.
Bricks 4 Kidz sets a $700/month minimum royalty on a first territory, a $150/month minimum marketing fee, and a required local advertising spend with a $750/month floor. Measured against that brand's median franchisee — not its worst — those three obligations total roughly $19,200 a year against $72,503 of gross revenue: about 26% of the top line before a single instructor is paid.
By contrast, neither fixed-location brand imposes a punitive floor relative to its revenue. Code Ninjas charges a flat 8.25% of net sales with no minimum royalty. iCode's $500/month minimum is comfortably below 8% of even its bottom-quartile median. The centers cost far more to open — and ask far less of you when things go badly.
None of this is hidden. All of it sits in Item 6 of each FDD. It is simply never the number in the brochure.
The largest STEM franchise in this guide by unit count, and the one with the deepest disclosure. Code Ninjas reports on 224 Learning Centers and 6 Studio Centers — 230 locations in total — with a median gross sales figure of $217,479 and an average of $237,614. Its best center did $730,612; its weakest did $43,091. Just under half of centers (49%) met or exceeded the average.
The initial franchise fee is $45,000 for a Learning Center ($35,000 for the smaller Studio format), with a total investment of $174,250 to $265,750. The royalty is 8.25% of net sales — the highest headline rate in the guide — plus a 2% marketing contribution and a $350 monthly technology fee.
The number that gives us pause is not financial. Code Ninjas has shrunk from 284 franchised centers at the start of 2023 to 238 at the end of 2025 — a net loss of 46 locations, or 16% of the system. The decline has slowed markedly (it lost 22 centers in 2023, 23 in 2024, and just 1 in 2025), which suggests a system that has finished shedding its weakest units rather than one still in trouble. But a prospective franchisee should ask directly what changed, and why.
The most expensive franchise in this guide and the fastest-growing. iCode Schools are substantial builds — 1,300 to 2,200 square feet with glass-walled classrooms and a full computer lab — and the total investment reflects it: $296,000 to $446,500, roughly double what a Code Ninjas center costs.
iCode publishes quartiles for its 37 schools but no system-wide median, so we will not invent one. What the quartiles show: the top quartile of nine schools had a median of $444,413 and an average of $566,365, with a single school reaching $1,148,757 — the highest individual figure disclosed by any brand in this guide. The bottom quartile of ten schools had a median of $153,947, with a low of $65,414.
The initial fee is $40,000, the royalty 8% of gross sales (subject to a $500/month minimum), and there is a 2% brand development fee and $500/month technology fee. iCode has grown its franchised base from 29 schools at the start of 2023 to 61 at the end of 2025 — it more than doubled — and it took its company-owned locations to zero in 2025, converting them out of corporate hands.
A separate, much lighter "iCode Reach" program (in-school delivery, $20,000 fee, 12% royalty) exists but had only two units open at the end of 2025 and is not covered by the Item 19 data above.
The outlier of the category, and the one that shows what mobile enrichment looks like at maturity. Founded in 1985, Mad Science runs after-school programs, camps, birthday parties, pre-school programs and NASA-licensed content across large territories — and its franchisees are running staffed operating companies, not owner-operator routes.
The Item 19 reports a median gross revenue of $323,000 per territory across 57 territories, with an average of $388,000, a high of $1,311,000, and a low of $85,000. Read the single-territory operators on their own — 24 franchisees who hold exactly one territory each — and the median rises to $436,000, with an average of $454,000. Multi-territory operators scale from there: seven two-territory franchisees averaged $667,000; five three-territory franchisees averaged $1,046,000.
One note on how to read this table. The filing labels its headline group "57 franchisees," but its own territory breakdown accounts for 37 franchisees holding 57 territories between them, and the revenue totals only reconcile on a per-territory basis. We have therefore treated the $323,000 median as per territory, and used the single-territory table — which is unambiguous — as the cleaner comparison for anyone buying one territory.
Investment runs $132,331 to $191,959 on a $49,000 initial fee, with an 8% royalty. The system is stable rather than growing: 70 franchised units at the start of 2023, 58 at the end of 2025, with the decline having stopped.
The cheapest entry point in the guide. A Mobile business can be opened for $34,200 to $49,050 on a $23,000 franchise fee; a fixed Creativity Center runs $77,150 to $110,550 on a $25,000 fee. Royalty is 7% of gross sales, or a $700/month minimum on a first territory.
Across its US franchisees for the year ended 30 September 2025, Bricks 4 Kidz reports a median gross revenue of $72,503 and an average of $101,813 — a gap that tells you the distribution is skewed by strong performers at the top. It is: the top 25% averaged $242,104 and the top 10% averaged $338,482, against a system high of $518,827.
The lowest reporting franchisee recorded no revenue at all. The franchisor states directly that some franchises reported little or no revenue owing to partial-year operation, delayed launch, or inactivity. Take that at face value — it is an unusually honest disclosure, and it means the median is dragged down by units that were not really trading. It also means the median is a truer picture of the average outcome than a curated "mature units only" figure would be.
The system has stabilised at 137 franchised units after falling from 155 at the start of 2023.
The fastest-growing mobile brand here: 129 franchised units at the start of 2023, 170 at the end of 2025, growing every single year. Challenge Island delivers STEAM programming in schools, after-school clubs, camps and parties, and its disclosure is the most granular in the guide — six separate tables cutting the data by percentile and by territory count.
Its full-time franchisees — 50 of them, holding 74 territories — had a median gross revenue of $57,246 and an average of $77,397. On a per-territory basis, the median is $42,021. The top quartile's median was $179,143; the bottom quartile's was $20,552.
The initial fee is $49,900 — the highest in the mobile group — against a total investment of just $58,465 to $74,050, meaning the fee is the overwhelming majority of what you spend. The royalty is 7% or a $400–$500/month minimum, with a 2% marketing fee (minimum $150/month). Notably, Challenge Island charges no technology fee: its FDD reserves the right to institute one at $250/month but states that currently no such fee exists.
Now part of Unleashed Brands, Snapology delivers LEGO-based and robotics STEAM programming on a mobile basis — and mobile is the only model currently offered. It has grown from 85 franchised units at the start of 2023 to 129 at the end of 2025.
Snapology publishes quartiles but no system-wide median. Its top quartile of 13 full-time franchisees had a median of $185,154 and an average of $279,820, topping out at $602,333. Its bottom quartile of 14 had a median of $18,451 and a low of $2,289. That 10× spread is the widest in this guide.
The franchisor also breaks out the 29 franchisees whose protected areas contain 50,000 children or fewer — which it identifies as the current focus of its offering, and therefore the most relevant subset to a new buyer. That group had a median of $51,447 and an average of $77,917.
Total investment is $74,950 to $105,600 on a $40,000 fee. The royalty is 7% or the escalating minimum described above. The technology fee is currently $125/month against a $500/month cap.
Right for you if: you have $175,000 to $450,000 of capital, you want a business with a defensible floor rather than an uncapped ceiling, and you are comfortable signing a commercial lease and managing a payroll of instructors. The disclosed data supports the expectation that an average operator earns an average result — the quartile spread is roughly 3×, not 10×. Code Ninjas is the cheaper entry with the deepest data; iCode is the bigger build with the higher top end.
Wrong for you if: you are undercapitalised. A center that opens without enough working capital to survive a slow first year is the unit that shows up in someone else's bottom quartile.
Right for you if: you are a natural salesperson, you want in for under $110,000, and you understand that you are buying a curriculum and a territory — not a business that runs without you. Your revenue will be a direct function of how many school districts, camp operators, and parents you personally persuade. Challenge Island and Bricks 4 Kidz are the lowest-capital routes; Mad Science is the mature, staffed version of the same model and the only one whose disclosed medians rival a fixed center.
Wrong for you if: you want semi-absentee income, or you are relying on the brand to generate demand. Every mobile brand in this guide has a bottom quartile earning between $18,000 and $21,000 a year in revenue, and a minimum royalty that keeps billing regardless.
Bricks 4 Kidz Mobile ($34,200–$49,050) and Challenge Island ($58,465–$74,050). The lowest-capital way into STEM franchising. Understand what you are buying: a curriculum, a brand, a territory, and a minimum royalty obligation. The revenue you generate will be almost entirely a function of your own selling.
Snapology ($74,950–$105,600) and Bricks 4 Kidz Creativity Center ($77,150–$110,550). Still mobile or lightly premised, with the same fundamental economics as the tier below.
Mad Science ($132,331–$191,959) and Code Ninjas ($174,250–$265,750). Two very different businesses at a similar price. Mad Science is a staffed mobile operation with the strongest median in the guide; Code Ninjas is a physical center with the deepest data and a shrinking footprint.
iCode ($296,000–$446,500). A serious commercial build-out. The upside is real — a top-quartile school medianed $444,413 — but so is the capital at risk, and the bottom quartile still medianed $153,947 against a build that may have cost you $400,000.
A few things emerge consistently across all six filings.
Revenue is not profit, and none of these filings disclose profit. Every Item 19 in this guide reports gross sales or gross revenue only. Before you take home anything, subtract instructor wages, rent (for the centers), royalty, marketing, technology fees, insurance, and — for the mobile brands — the very substantial cost of your own time spent selling. iCode's filing is explicit that its figures "do not reflect any costs of sales, operating expenses, or other costs."
The fixed-location premium is real but it buys consistency, not just scale. Code Ninjas and iCode cost two to eight times more to open than the mobile brands. What that capital buys is a narrower range of outcomes — roughly a 3× quartile spread against 4× to 10× for the mobile brands — and freedom from a minimum-royalty floor that can consume a third of a struggling operator's revenue.
Growth and performance are pointing in different directions. The two fastest-growing systems here (iCode, which more than doubled its franchised units since 2023; Challenge Island, up 32%) sit at opposite ends of the revenue table. The brand with the strongest per-unit economics (Mad Science) is not growing at all. Unit growth tells you about franchise sales, not franchisee outcomes — and in this category the two have almost nothing to do with each other.
Ask about the fourth quartile. Every franchisor in this guide will happily talk about the top quartile. The data that matters to a first-time franchisee is in the bottom one, and every one of these brands has published it.
On disclosed per-unit revenue, Mad Science is the strongest: a median of $323,000 per territory, and $436,000 for franchisees operating a single territory. iCode's top quartile of schools posted the highest individual figures ($444,413 median, up to $1,148,757). But these are revenue figures, not profit, and Mad Science's franchisees are running staffed operations with correspondingly heavy payroll.
From $34,200 for a Bricks 4 Kidz mobile business to $446,500 for a fully built iCode School. The mobile and in-school brands cluster between $34,000 and $192,000; the fixed-location centers run $174,000 to $447,000.
Some franchisees clearly do — Snapology and Challenge Island both report separate figures for part-time operators, and Snapology's full-time-only tables exist precisely because part-time results differ. Be realistic about what that means: the mobile brands' bottom quartiles, with medians between $18,000 and $21,000, are where part-time and under-committed operators tend to land.
Every mobile brand in this guide charges the greater of a percentage of your sales or a fixed monthly minimum. If your revenue is strong the minimum never bites. If it is weak, the minimum becomes an effective royalty rate far above the headline percentage — for a bottom-quartile Snapology franchisee, the year-one minimum alone works out to roughly 39% of gross revenue. Ask for the minimum royalty schedule before you sign, and model it against the franchisor's own bottom-quartile revenue figure.
Because only six STEM franchisors disclose franchisee financial performance in Item 19 of their FDD. Disclosure is voluntary. We think a franchisor's willingness to show you what its franchisees actually earn is itself a meaningful signal, so we cover only the brands that do. Little Medical School makes no financial performance representation; Stemtree's Item 19 discloses only a single company-owned outlet, with no franchisee data.
No, and the economics differ. Tutoring and test-prep brands sell academic remediation against a measurable outcome — a grade, a score. STEM enrichment sells engagement and skills, and competes for discretionary family spending against sports, music, and camps. Our education franchise guide covers tutoring, test prep and early childhood brands.
FDD (Franchise Disclosure Document). The document a franchisor must give you at least 14 days before you sign anything. It has 23 numbered Items. Every figure in this guide comes from one of them.
Item 19 — Financial Performance Representation (FPR). The only place a franchisor may make claims about what franchisees earn. Providing one is voluntary. A brand with no Item 19 is legally barred from telling you what its franchisees make — which is why we only cover brands that publish one.
Gross sales / gross revenue. Everything the business takes in, before any costs. Not profit. None of the brands in this guide disclose profit.
Median and average. The median is the middle franchisee; the average is the arithmetic mean. When the average sits well above the median — Bricks 4 Kidz reports an average of $101,813 against a median of $72,503 — a handful of strong performers are pulling the average up, and the median is the more honest guide to a typical outcome. A tighter distribution looks like Code Ninjas: an average of $237,614 against a median of $217,479 across 224 centers.
Quartile. A quarter of the franchise system, ranked by revenue. The "bottom quartile" is the weakest 25% of franchisees — and it is the number worth studying hardest.
Minimum royalty. A fixed monthly fee you owe regardless of sales, charged when it exceeds the percentage royalty. It is the single most important term in Item 6 for anyone whose revenue may start slowly.
Item 20 — Outlets. The three-year count of units opened, closed, transferred and terminated. It is the fastest way to see whether a system is growing or shrinking.
The honest summary of this category is that the model matters more than the brand. If you want a business with a floor — something that will produce a defensible income even if you turn out to be an average operator — the fixed-location centers are the only ones whose disclosed data supports that expectation, and you will pay $174,000 to $447,000 for it. If you are a natural salesperson who wants to get into business for under $75,000 and is prepared to go and win school contracts personally, the mobile brands can work, and their top quartiles are respectable. What the mobile brands cannot offer is a floor. Their own filings say so.
Whichever direction you lean, pull the current FDD, read Item 6 and Item 19 side by side, and ask a franchise attorney to walk you through the minimum royalty schedule before you sign anything.
Javier is an experienced franchise industry professional with a focus on development, operations, and performance. With almost a decade of experience in the industry, he has witnessed both the successes and failures of franchise owners. Javier strongly believes that buying a franchise is not just an investment, but a life-changing event that presents a unique opportunity for personal and professional growth. He enjoys helping aspiring franchise owners navigate the decision-making process and increase their chances of success.
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