McDonald’s digital sales surge, loyalty platform becomes growth engine

McDonald’s is no longer treating digital ordering as a side channel. It is becoming one of the company’s main growth engines, with systemwide sales to loyalty members across 70 markets rising 20% to nearly $37 billion in 2025 and 90-day active loyalty users reaching nearly 210 million by year-end.

That scale matters on the restaurant floor. A business built around app orders, kiosks, delivery, and loyalty offers changes how crews are paced, how managers watch order flow, and how much of a shift is shaped by software instead of the counter. McDonald’s said global systemwide sales topped $139 billion in 2025, so the digital push is not a niche experiment. It is now central to how the chain drives traffic and repeat visits.

The company’s loyalty business has moved fast. McDonald’s launched it in the United States in 2020, then expanded it into a global ecosystem that now spans 70 loyalty markets. In December 2023, McDonald’s set a target of 250 million 90-day active users by 2027, up from 150 million at the time. At the end of 2025, it was at nearly 210 million, leaving the chain still pushing to add about 40 million more active users to hit that goal. The U.S. app alone had 46 million 90-day active users in the February earnings call, a sign that digital engagement has become a major customer-acquisition channel, not just a convenience feature.

McDonald’s has described the shift as a companywide overhaul. In August 2025, it called its digital transformation strategy, Digitizing the Arches, a once-in-a-generation transformation. The company’s partnership with Google Cloud, announced in December 2023, is meant to connect cloud technology across thousands of restaurants and apply generative AI solutions across the business. McDonald’s said that work is intended to improve experiences for customers, restaurant teams, and employees. On the ground, that includes tests of voice ordering and digital shift management tools designed to streamline operations and improve crew efficiency.

For workers, the question is whether that technology makes a shift easier or simply faster. Ready on Arrival has helped speed service, but delivery also brings margin pressure from third-party fees, while app traffic and loyalty promotions can stack more orders onto the same staffing levels. Nearly 500 million Monopoly games were played during the 2025 promotion, another reminder that McDonald’s is pairing digital habits with constant engagement. The company’s growth story now runs through the kitchen, the drive-thru, and the screen, and crews are the ones who have to keep all three moving at once.