Meineke
General Automotive Repair
How franchisees’ loans performed
Every SBA-guaranteed loan to a Meineke franchisee approved between 2010–2026. This is the only public record of what happened to people who actually bought this franchise — the disclosure document does not report it.
Rates below count only finished loans — ones that have been repaid in full or written off. A loan still being repaid has not succeeded yet, and counting it as though it had would make every brand look better than it is.
36 of 166 finished loans were charged off
21.7% of finished loans charged off
- Loans on record
- 279
- Finished — repaid or written off
- 166
- Outcome withheld by SBA
- 75 — 27% of all loans
- Median loan approved
- $301,800
How that splits by when the loan was approved
| Approved | Loans | Finished | Charged off | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before 2015 | 67 | 58 (9 still running) | 15 | 25.9% |
| 2015-2019 | 111 | 79 (32 still running) | 17 | 21.5% |
| 2020 onwards | 101 | 29 (72 still running) | 4 | 13.8% |
Read the newest row with care. A franchise that fails does so in its first two or three years, while one that succeeds takes the full term to repay — so recent vintages are weighted towards failures and toward loans that have not finished. That cuts both ways: it can overstate the risk of a brand that has simply been lending recently, and it can be the first sign of a system getting worse. The still-running counts are there so you can see which.
By dollar rather than by loan: SBA wrote off $6,809,985 of the $67,054,700 it lent on finished loans — 10.2%, against 21.7% by count. The two differ because failures are not the same size as successes, and because a default late in the term recovers most of the loan. Neither is the truer figure; they answer different questions.
Source: U.S. Small Business Administration 7(a) FOIA disclosure data. A loan is counted only once it has been repaid in full or charged off — loans still running are neither a success nor a failure, and counting them as repaid would flatter every brand here. Loans whose status SBA withheld are excluded from the figures above and shown separately. The median is the loan approved, not the cost of opening — most projects are financed with additional capital.