We focus on the healthy ways to live on The Greenest. We like to tell you about the best habits to stay fit. The best foods the incorporate into your diet. And we even help you figure out the supplement aisle. But one of our biggest focuses is helping you understand how healthy your neighborhood is. Because where you live (and what’s around you) has such a crazy impact on how healthy you are.
And while we like to bring up the healthy options, you can also learn even more by seeing how popular the traditionally “unhealthy” options are in an area. Are the people in an area choosing the unhealthy option at a higher rate than they should be? And yes, McDonald’s has “healthy” options. But let’s be honest, most people aren’t going to the Golden Arches for a McSalad.
So what does the data in your area say and where does your local McDonald’s rank in the nation? Just put your zip code in the tool below and you’ll see.
Why McDonald’s? It’s true that Whole Foods has its devotees and Trader Joe’s has its superfans, but there is only one chain in the United States that works as an actual unit of measurement. Each and every American lives near a McDonald’s. There are 12,987 locations in our foot-traffic dataset, spread across all fifty states and D.C., and between November 2025 and April 2026 we measured billions of visits walking through those doors. Annualized, the number comes out to 6.83 billion — roughly twenty McDonald’s visits for every person in the country, every year. That seems like a lot and it dwarfs any comparison’s to “healthy” places.
Which raises a question we can now actually answer: where does your McDonald’s fit? Is the one down the street a sleepy small-town franchise or secretly one of the busiest restaurants in America? We ranked all 12,987 by annual foot traffic, and we built a tool so you can look yours up.
If I’m being honest, I don’t really eat at McDonald’s very often. It was my favorite place to go as a kid. It was a ritual. It was the treat for being good. It was the treat for winning anything in sports. And it was the treat for the sake of the treat. It was a mecca of the perfect food. But as I got older I realized that while it was still an institution, my eating habits changed. It is delicious, don’t get me wrong. But I try to eat healthier these days and there are just too many temptations there. But if I was going to go back to McDonald’s I would go whole hog and opt for a double quarter pounder meal deal with the fries and a coke. And who knows, maybe wash it down with a strawberry shake, too.
Who orders the salad at McDonald’s? I’m not sure. That’s sort of like going to IHOP and getting the omelette. McDonald’s does the fast food side of their menu really well (obviously.) But if you were looking for a salad there’s probably better places to get one.
The National Picture, in Three Numbers
A typical McDonald’s serves about 513,000 visitors a year, which comes out to around 1,400 a day. That is an incredible amount of Big Macs. And the gap between an average store and the busiest in America is smaller than you’d think.
Two things stand out in the distribution. First, there is no such thing as an empty McDonald’s: even a 10th-percentile store logs 341,000 visits a year, or more than 900 a day. Second, the ceiling is low compared to other chains we’ve ranked. The single busiest McDonald’s in America does only about 3 times the traffic of the median one — at Whole Foods that ratio is 2 to 1 across just 450 stores, and at most chains with 13,000 locations you’d expect the extremes to be far wilder. McDonald’s runs the most consistently busy network of buildings in the country. The machine is tuned.
Look Up Your McDonald’s
Type in your ZIP code (or your city) and we’ll find your closest McDonald’s, show you its annual and daily traffic, where it ranks among all 12,987, and the census profile of its neighborhood — then let you tap through the other locations near you. You can check your Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods while you’re in there, too.
The 10 Busiest McDonald’s in America
The short version: the national top 10 is unlike any other chain we’ve seen. There’s a wide mix of a tourist megastore, two New York City corners, two Hawaiian islands, and a string of highway towns you’ve probably only seen from a car.
Busiest McDonald’s locations, by annual visits
Top 10 of 12,987 U.S. locations · measured foot traffic, annualized
The #1 store is no mystery to anyone who has taken kids to Orlando. The McD’s near Disney is an the enormous multi-story Mcmansion on Sand Lake Road near International Drive. It has the play arcade, billed as the world’s largest entertainment McDonald’s and it pulls in 1.61 million visits a year, about 4,400 a day. It beats out a Broadway location in upper Manhattan by a hair.
I think the biggest surprises in the data were Hawaii showing up twice and Austin, TX. Hawaii mostly because I would think that people on vacation would like to try new places that they haven’t been before. (Maybe that’s a wrong assumption?) And in terms of Austin, I always thought of Austin as a sort of hippie, local-focused culture. I thought they would be more into farmer’s markets than McDonald’s. And it’s not to say that everyone in Austin is organic and crunchy. But I assumed that percentage would have been higher who may have sworn off a trip to the golden arches.
The Two Ends of the Golden Arches
We used McDonald’s as the benchmark because literally everyone knows where one is in their area. It may not be next door, but it is within a 20 minute drive, typically. It’s also such an American institution that it is a version of the town square. My grandfather used to meet up with a group of friends every morning at McDonald’s. They would sit there for a few hours, drink coffee, gossip, have a little breakfast, and then gossip some more. It was their safe place. And that’s what a lot of people feel when they think of McDonald’s.
About This Data
Rankings come from our proprietary location-intelligence dataset covering 12,987 U.S. McDonald’s locations and their measured foot traffic (annualized from the November 1, 2025 – April 30, 2026 measurement window). Visit counts are foot-traffic measurements, not sales, and count visits rather than unique visitors. Comparison figures for other chains come from the same dataset and window. “Median household income” describes the census characteristics of the neighborhoods a chain’s measured visitors travel from, not the finances of any individual customer; the lookup tool’s income and age figures are Census ACS 2023 medians for each store’s ZIP code. A small number of locations in the source data may be closed or under renovation. Bar lengths are proportional within the chart.
Cory Jones has spent 20 years in media and publishing and now leads the data and editorial operation behind The Greenest. He built and maintains the site’s Neighborhood Wellness Score — a proprietary dataset scoring food access, walkability, air quality, healthcare access, and health outcomes across 18,356 U.S. ZIP codes, drawing on CDC PLACES data, EPA air quality readings, and verified location intelligence. He is a huge fan of Rancho Gordo beans and tries to work out more than he actually works out.
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