Dive Brief:
- Pizza Hut will close around 250 stores in the U.S. in H1 2026 as part of an ongoing review of the chain’s positioning and strategy, Yum Brands CFO Ranjith Roy said on the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call.
- Yum began evaluating Pizza Hut’s system last year and is considering a sale of the brand, which has lagged behind other major pizza chains in sales growth in recent years.
- Pizza Hut’s U.S. same-store sales fell by 3% in Q4 and by 5% for the year, according to Yum’s earnings release, indicating that the brand’s problems continue.
Dive Insight:
The coming U.S. closures are part of a program called “Hut Forward,” Roy told analysts on the call. That program includes “a vibrant marketing program, modernization of certain technology and franchise agreements and Yum providing a one-time contribution to marketing support,” Roy said, framing the program as a bridge to longer term growth.
Roy said the closures would target underperforming U.S. stores. Yum’s most recent earnings release did not include the precise number of Pizza Hut’s U.S. stores, but in its 10-Q filing for Q3, the chain said about 32% of the 19,872 stores it possessed at the time were located in the U.S., for a storebase of about 6,360 locations.
Closing 250 units would mean shutting down about 4% of the brand’s system in the U.S., a significant retrenchment for a QSR brand, comparable in scale to Starbucks’ 400-unit closure in September.
CEO Chris Turner said Yum’s review of strategic options for Pizza Hut is continuing as planned.
“As of now, we intend to complete the review of options this year,” Turner said on the call. “Given the ongoing nature of the process, at this time, we cannot share further details.”
When the company announced the review in November it said the process could lead to a sale of Pizza Hut and that a different ownership structure might be needed to see the chain through its turnaround.
Yum has spent considerable sums on the review process — $36 million in 2025, including $32 million in Q4, according to its earnings release. The chain also wrote off $5 million in franchise incentive assets in 2025 “associated with rationalizing the Pizza Hut estate in preparation for a potential transaction,” the company said.
The chain's worldwide store count dropped from 20,225 at the end of 2024 to 19,974 at the end of 2025. Many of those international closures stemmed from the early 2025 termination of the chain’s master franchising agreement with its Turkish operator, resulting in the shuttering of 254 Pizza Huts in Turkey, according to the earnings release.
