The Astounding Number Of McDonald's Locations In The US

Visit many small towns — though not all villages and rural communities — and right near the center, there is typically a McDonald's restaurant. Make your way into a city, and there are multiples, so many that it seems like there's a store on every block. McDonald's is the largest fast food chain in the entire world, with a huge impact on the American economy, and it's constantly reinventing itself (as with the CosMc restaurant concept), but have you ever wondered just how many locations it has in the U.S. alone?

Hold onto your burger wrapper because McDonald's ended 2023 with 13,457 stores in the U.S., including all 50 states, (plus all five populated U.S. territories). While the state with the most McDonald's locations is California, which is currently home to 1,222 restaurants, it is not L.A. (nor New York City, or even Chicago, where McDonald's HQ is located) — it is Houston, Texas, which holds the record for most locations in a single city. There are a whopping 126 McDonald's restaurants in the Houston area.

If you thought the U.S. numbers were impressive, wait until you discover McDonald's' global footprint. The fast-food behemoth currently has over 41,000 restaurants around the world, in over 100 different countries. According to Statista, McDonald's is quite popular in Asia, with China clocking in at over 6,000 of the fast-food joints, and Japan with about half that, at nearly 3,000. In McDonald's' European market, France is the country with the most restaurants (over 1,500), followed by the U.K. with the next most.

You might have heard that McDonald's actually tailors its global menus according to national, regional, or even local tastes. It's true — while the fast-food chain tends to keep its core items (like the Big Mac) on the menu, it supplements it with foods that suit the different palates, laws, and religious beliefs of the region in which they're located. One example is the vegetarian- and chicken-heavy menu in India, a country which has been known as a vegetarian nation in the past, but which has seen a rise in chicken consumption.

If you don't have a passport to try all these international flavors, though, you can travel to Chicago and hit up the McDonald's Global Menu restaurant, where the chain offers a rotating menu of favorites from around the world. Past and present items include the Ebi Filet-O-Burger from Japan, the BBQ Bacon Stack from the U.K., and the McPops from Spain.