Guide · Franchise
A franchise sells three things: credibility with referral sources, a working system, and speed. If your shortage is credibility and system — no healthcare background, no referral relationships — the franchise is selling the thing you lack. If your shortage is only information, our dataset and a $49 kit are the cheaper purchase by two orders of magnitude.
On a $500,000-gross planning example, a 5–6% royalty-plus-advertising load is about $27,500 a year — ~$275,000 across ten years — before the six-figure initial investment. The independent spends some of that on its own marketing and mistakes, keeps the rest, and can also sell the agency at the end without a franchisor's transfer terms. Neither column is a verdict; both columns are arithmetic you are entitled to see before signing.
State verdict → opening number → franchise comparison. A franchise agreement signed against a closed door, a scope you can't sell, or a runway you can't fund is an expensive way to learn geography. The free tools on this site exist to run the first two steps before anyone's discovery day.
Guides are general; verdicts are specific. The license checker applies your state's rules to your service mix, and the cost calculator prices your opening from the same dataset this guide cites.
The free checkers give you the verdict and the number. The Kit gives you the working papers: your state's application packet walked through in filing order, the policies-and-procedures binder spec (what your binder must contain — never a boilerplate binder), the administrator self-audit, the insurance & bond spec sheet, the Medicaid gate map, the franchise-vs-independent 10-year worksheets, and the payroll-runway planner.
$49 one-time payment
Included in the $49 HomeCareLicenseCheck Kit
