Costa Coffee Franchise Availability in the US, 2026

You cannot buy a Costa Coffee franchise in the United States. Costa franchises in roughly 50 other markets around the world, and the US is not one of them. That is the entire shape of this page: a brand that genuinely franchises, just not here, the same situation our Five Guys franchise availability page covers for a different brand and a different reason.

Before anything else, you should know where the information below comes from, because it is not where you would expect. Across two different research tools and twelve separate attempts, we tried to load Costa Coffee’s own US pages: the main us.costacoffee.com site, its contact page, its costa-business and costa-business/partnering pages, even its robots.txt file, plus costacoffee.com/franchise directly. Every single attempt timed out or failed to connect. We do not know whether that is a technical problem or a bot-blocking measure on Costa’s end, and we are not going to guess which. What we do know is that we were not able to read one word Costa has published about its own US plans. Everything in this article comes from trade reporting instead, not from a Costa statement, and we are saying that plainly here rather than letting a source citation at the bottom of the page quietly stand in for a company statement we do not have.

Does Costa Coffee franchise in the US?

No, not right now, and nothing in the trade reporting reviewed for this article suggests that is about to change. Costa Coffee franchises in roughly 50 markets outside the United States, which makes it a genuinely franchised brand in the way Five Guys or Dunkin’ are, just not one you can buy into domestically. That distinction matters: this is not a brand that has decided never to franchise, the way Philz Coffee or In-N-Out have. It is a brand actively running a franchise system elsewhere in the world while keeping the US as company-owned and business-to-business territory.

What Costa’s actual US footprint looks like

According to trade reporting from Restaurant Business Online, CSP Daily News, QSR Magazine, and World Coffee Portal, Costa’s US retail presence is small and entirely company-owned: about six cafes total, five of them in Atlanta and one at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. No franchised Costa cafe shows up anywhere in that reporting. If you have visited a Costa cafe in the US, you were almost certainly standing in one of those six locations, not in a franchisee-run store.

Why Costa is pursuing a B2B strategy instead of franchised retail

The same reporting describes Costa’s US growth plan as business-to-business rather than franchised retail. The centerpiece is a self-serve “Smart Cafe” machine that Costa places in hospitals, college campuses, hotels, and convenience stores, letting those venues offer Costa-branded coffee without a cafe, a lease, or a franchisee behind the counter. That is a different growth model than selling franchises: it scales through wholesale placement deals with institutions, not by recruiting individual owner-operators. If you were hoping to open a walk-in Costa cafe as a franchisee, this is the model that has replaced that option in the US, at least for now.

Who owns Costa, and what that has to do with a US franchise

Coca-Cola owns Costa Coffee outright, and that ownership has been unsettled lately in a way worth knowing about if you are trying to gauge Costa’s US intentions. Per World Coffee Portal’s reporting on June 22, 2026, Coca-Cola shelved an attempt to sell Costa for roughly $2 billion in January 2026 after weak investor interest, and is exploring a corporate restructuring of the business instead. The same reporting notes that Costa’s operating loss more than doubled, from £5.8 million in fiscal year 2023 to £13.5 million in fiscal year 2024.

Read those figures for what they are: Coca-Cola’s own parent-level numbers about the Costa business as a whole, not a statement about what any single outlet earns, and not a franchise disclosure of any kind. A parent company that weighed a sale, shelved it, and is now considering a restructuring is not the profile of a business about to launch a new US franchise program. It is also not proof one will never happen. This ownership context matters to how seriously you take the “not now” answer, not because it tells you anything about unit-level performance.

A number you may see elsewhere, and why it is not repeated here

If you search around, you may run into franchise directory sites listing a specific investment range for a “Costa Coffee franchise.” That figure could not be verified against anything Costa has published, and based on how it is described, it appears to describe one of Costa’s roughly 50 franchised markets outside the US, not a domestic offer. Since there is no US Costa franchise to buy, repeating that number here would risk implying a US opportunity that does not exist, so it is left out.

What to do if you want a coffee franchise in the US right now

If Costa was your way into thinking about a coffee franchise, the brand itself is not the path in the US today, but the category still is. Our coffee franchise cost guide breaks down real, verified Item 7 investment figures for brands that do currently sell US franchises, so you can compare actual numbers instead of chasing one that describes a market you cannot buy into. If you want to see how we have handled a similar “franchises, but not here” situation before, our Five Guys franchise availability page walks through a US-and-Canada version of the same problem, and our Dutch Bros and Black Rock Coffee Bar pages cover two coffee brands that stepped away from franchising entirely, a different situation from Costa’s but one that comes up in the same searches.

For how we source and verify every figure on this site, see our editorial methodology page.