Wendy’s Meritage Closures: 13 More Restaurants Shut on October 18, Up to 60 More by Mid-November

Meritage Hospitality Group closed 13 more Wendy’s restaurants on Sunday, October 18, pushing total Wendy’s Meritage closures past 33 since its September 17 Chapter 11 filing. Court documents say up to 60 more could shut through mid-November. Here is which locations closed, why the franchisee keeps cutting, and what it all means for Wendy’s fans.

If you have been following the Wendy’s saga this month, this story probably feels familiar. Meritage Hospitality Group, one of the biggest Wendy’s franchisees in the country, ran 314 franchised restaurants across 15 states and employed around 8,850 people when it filed for Chapter 11 on September 17. Since then it has been closing underperforming locations in waves, and the October 18 round was the most geographically scattered one yet. Honestly, it is getting hard to keep track, so let’s walk through what happened.

📰 Which 13 Wendy’s Locations Closed on October 18?

Thirteen restaurants across six states shut their doors on Sunday, October 18. This batch stretched from Oklahoma to Massachusetts, making it the widest-spread closure round so far in the bankruptcy:

According to court filings cited by Nation’s Restaurant News, these closings bring the total number of Wendy’s restaurants Meritage has shut since late September past 33. And there is more coming: the same filings project up to 60 additional closures through November 13 under a court-approved agreement.

📉 How Many Wendy’s Meritage Closures Have There Been Since September?

To keep the Wendy’s Meritage closures straight, you have to count in two phases. Before the bankruptcy filing, Meritage had already closed roughly 60 underperforming restaurants starting in late 2025, a move it estimated would improve annual EBITDA by about $8 million. Then, after filing for Chapter 11 on September 17, it began shuttering locations in weekend waves.

The October 18 batch of 13 brings the post-filing total past 33. If the full projected list plays out, the franchisee could close up to 60 more by mid-November. Do the math and this adds up to roughly 150 restaurants gone from a chain that once counted 374 Wendy’s locations at its peak.

Each closure follows the same logic: shed the lease, kill the money pit, preserve cash for the lenders holding $155 million in secured debt. Kevin Cleary has been appointed Chief Restructuring Officer to steer the process.

💸 Why Is Wendy’s Closing So Many Restaurants?

This is where the numbers get ugly. The restaurants on the chopping block are the weakest in the system. Court documents show some of these locations generated less than $900,000 a year in revenue, which is under half of the average for the Wendy’s system. Every one of the targeted stores had negative EBITDA, and some lost nearly $200,000 over the past 12 months.

Meritage has been blunt about what went wrong. Same-store sales fell 7.2 percent in fiscal 2025 and another 8.3 percent in the first half of 2026. The company reported net losses of $31.5 million and $23.1 million across those periods. It points to weak sales, elevated beef costs, relentless national discounting, disruptive weather, and marketing under prior brand officials that it describes as less effective. EBITDA is down 48 percent, with margins at a 30-year low.

In plain English: the stores losing money are being cut so the company can survive Chapter 11 with something left to sell or reorganize.

⚖️ Why Did Meritage Hospitality Group Go Bankrupt?

The bankruptcy filing on September 17 did not come out of nowhere. One day earlier, Wendy’s subsidiary Quality Is Our Recipe, LLC, terminated all of Meritage’s franchise agreements, effective immediately, claiming the operator owed roughly $146.9 million in royalties, fees, and other contractual charges. Meritage filed for Chapter 11 the very next day in the Western District of Michigan, arguing the termination was not legally effective and that its franchise agreements remain estate property.

On October 1, the company escalated further, suing Wendy’s and the subsidiary for a court declaration that the termination failed, pointing to notice requirements, lender cure rights, and forbearance history going back to an October 2025 payment-default notice. That legal fight is still playing out while the closures continue.

So this is two crises in one: a financial collapse driven by years of falling sales and rising costs, and a franchise-control battle that will decide whether Meritage even keeps the restaurants it is not closing.

🍔 Is Wendy’s Going Out of Business?

No, and this is the part people keep mixing up. Wendy’s as a brand is not going out of business. The closures are happening at one distressed franchisee, Meritage Hospitality Group, not across the entire Wendy’s system. Wendy’s corporate has treated the situation as a franchisee-specific problem and is working the process case by case.

That said, Wendy’s has been shrinking on its own terms too. The chain has closed a net of more than 300 locations since 2024, including 245 net closures in the first half of 2026 alone. The difference is intent: most of those closures were deliberate, designed to cut weak stores and improve franchisee profitability. Still, this Meritage collapse is the largest Wendy’s franchisee failure since the 2020 bankruptcy of NPC International, which operated 393 Wendy’s units, so the Wendy’s Meritage closures are being watched closely as a stress test for the brand’s franchise model.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🔗 Related Reading