Pizza Hut posts worst sales drop among top 50 chains

Pizza Hut’s place at the bottom of NRN’s Top 50 was more than a bad ranking. It was a scoreboard moment that showed how hard the chain is being squeezed just as Yum! Brands moves to hand over ownership and shrink its U.S. footprint.

Among the 50 biggest restaurant chains, Pizza Hut posted the worst sales performance, down 8.2 percent. That came in a year when foodservice inflation again outpaced Top 500 sales growth and overall sales growth slowed for the fourth straight year. Pizza sales as a category also moved backward, down 0.3 percent, while burger, sandwich and broader quick-service brands generally fared better. For Pizza Hut workers and franchise operators, that kind of gap matters because weak traffic makes it harder to defend labor hours, fund menu support and keep delivery operations running at the pace managers are asked to maintain.

The sales pressure lines up with a major ownership change. On June 16, Yum! Brands said it agreed to sell Pizza Hut for $2.7 billion in the aggregate, splitting the business between Pizza Hut Ex-China, which will go to LongRange Capital for about $1.5 billion, and Pizza Hut China, which will go to Yum China Holdings, Inc. Yum said its strategic review of Pizza Hut began in November 2025, and the company’s leadership team and board decided the sale offered the strongest path to maximize shareholder value.

The operating numbers explain why the brand is being pushed into “Hut Forward.” Pizza Hut’s U.S. same-store sales fell 4 percent in the first quarter of 2026, after a 3 percent decline in the fourth quarter of 2025. For fiscal 2025, same-store sales fell 5 percent and systemwide sales dropped 8 percent. Yum has also said Pizza Hut will close about 250 U.S. stores in the first half of 2026, a move that will ripple through kitchen crews, delivery drivers and shift managers in markets where stores disappear or consolidate.

Pizza Hut still opened 443 new restaurants in the fourth quarter of 2025 and 1,184 gross new restaurants across 65 countries during the year, but the chain ended 2025 with 19,974 global stores, down from 20,225 at the end of 2024. The brand once led the category worldwide until Domino’s overtook it in 2017. At the end of that year, Pizza Hut still had 16,748 global locations, compared with Domino’s 14,856. The gap has widened since then as Domino’s leaned harder into delivery and digital ordering.

Yum’s broader system remains stronger than Pizza Hut alone. In the fourth quarter of 2025, total system sales rose 5 percent, helped by 3 percent unit growth and 3 percent same-store sales growth, and digital sales surpassed $11 billion for the year, representing almost 60 percent of the mix. That makes Pizza Hut’s slide look less like a companywide problem and more like a brand-specific fight for relevance, value and speed in a category that has moved on.