Net Lease Weekly: What a Year of Lease Term Is Actually Worth

By ANL Research · Week of August 17, 2026

The short version

The single most reliable price signal in single-tenant net lease right now is not the tenant. It is the number of years left on the lease.

Across the 872 live listings in our database, asking cap rates fall from 6.72 percent on deals with under five years of remaining term to 5.42 percent on deals with fifteen years or more. That is a spread of 130 basis points, and it falls monotonically through every band in between.

What is more useful than the spread itself is its shape. The market does not pay evenly for term. Moving a deal from under five years to the five-to-ten band is worth 59 basis points. Ten-to-fifteen to fifteen-plus is worth 25. The first few years of term are worth more than twice what the last few are — because what buyers are paying to escape is not short duration, it is re-leasing risk. Once that risk is priced out, additional term is close to free.

That has a direct consequence for anyone buying this quarter: if you are willing to underwrite a re-leasing event, the short end of the curve is where the yield is, and it is not close. If you are not, you should stop paying premiums for years seventeen through twenty.

The term curve

Every listing below carries an asking cap rate stated by the listing broker. None are derived or estimated by us.

Remaining term	Listings	Average ask	Median ask	Middle 50%
Under 5 years	47	6.72%	6.85%	6.00% – 7.80%
5 to 10 years	134	6.13%	6.00%	5.50% – 6.83%
10 to 15 years	280	5.67%	5.65%	5.14% – 6.15%
15 years or more	411	5.42%	5.40%	4.75% – 6.00%

Two things in this table deserve more attention than the averages.

The short end is the least consistently priced part of the market. The middle half of sub-five-year deals spans 180 basis points, from 6.00 to 7.80 percent. In the ten-to-fifteen band that spread narrows to 101 basis points. Short-term product gets priced deal by deal, on the specific corner, the specific rent-to-sales, and the specific broker’s read of renewal probability. That dispersion is not noise. It is the opportunity — it means the short end rewards actual underwriting in a way the middle of the curve does not.

Note what the fifteen-plus band does not do: it does not tighten further. Its middle half spans 125 basis points, wider than the ten-to-fifteen band’s 101. Long duration alone does not produce price agreement, because that band holds both McDonald’s ground leases at 3.89 percent and Burger King at 6.12 percent. The tightest pricing in this market is not the longest lease — it is the lease long enough to remove re-leasing risk, on a credit the market has already made up its mind about.

Nearly half the market is long. 411 of the 872 live listings — 47 percent — carry fifteen years or more of remaining term. Any portfolio-level average of this market is therefore mostly a description of long-term product, and it will systematically understate what short-duration assets actually cost. When a headline number tells you retail net lease is at 5.4 percent, it is describing the half of the market that a 1031 buyer with a 45-day clock is most likely to be looking at, and not the half where the yield is.

QSR is not one market

Trade publications quote a single cap rate for quick-service restaurants. Our data says that number describes almost nothing.

Across the 19 QSR tenants carrying three or more listings — 295 of our 305 live QSR listings — asking cap rates run from 3.89 percent to 7.10 percent at the tenant level. That is a 321 basis point range inside a single sector.

Tenant	Listings	Average ask	Average term
McDonald’s	29	3.89%	18.4 yrs
Chick-fil-A	31	4.27%	14.0 yrs
Raising Cane’s	11	4.66%	14.5 yrs
Whataburger	16	5.03%	11.4 yrs
Taco Bell	21	5.27%	18.6 yrs
Dutch Bros Coffee	13	5.35%	14.9 yrs
Dunkin’	14	5.54%	15.3 yrs
Bojangles’	6	5.63%	10.5 yrs
Starbucks	34	5.67%	9.8 yrs
Popeyes	19	5.76%	17.9 yrs
Wendy’s	30	5.77%	15.8 yrs
Arby’s	10	5.80%	16.6 yrs
7 Brew Coffee	8	6.03%	15.0 yrs
Sonic	7	6.06%	14.6 yrs
Burger King	24	6.12%	15.1 yrs
KFC	9	6.37%	15.1 yrs
Pizza Hut	6	6.50%	12.9 yrs
Dairy Queen	3	6.58%	20.0 yrs
Jack in the Box	4	7.10%	12.7 yrs

The listings column is the denominator for the asking column, not the term column. Remaining term is stated on 224 of these 295 listings, and coverage is thin on several rows — 7 Brew’s 15.0 years is a single listing, Dairy Queen’s 20.0 is two, and Bojangles’ 10.5 is two. Read the term column as indicative on any row with fewer than ten listings.

Read the term column alongside the cap rate column and the ranking stops looking like a credit ranking. Starbucks carries the shortest average term in the table at 9.8 years, across 28 stated terms, and still asks 5.67 percent — inside Burger King at 6.12 percent on 15.1 years. Term is doing real work in this market, but at the tenant level brand is doing more, and the two frequently pull in opposite directions.

The cleanest demonstration is inside a single corporate family. Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut share a parent in Yum! Brands, and in most of the deals we see all three are franchisee-operated on comparable lease forms. They ask 5.27 percent, 6.37 percent, and 6.50 percent — a 123 basis point span with the corporate credit held constant.

Term explains only a little of it. Pizza Hut’s 12.9-year average sits in the ten-to-fifteen band and Taco Bell’s 18.6 in the fifteen-plus band, and the curve above prices that exact move at 25 basis points. That leaves roughly 98 of the 123 basis points as the market pricing three brands’ unit economics differently, with the same parent on the guarantee — and unit economics reprice a great deal faster than leases do.

Where our book sits against the national benchmark

The Boulder Group’s Q2 2026 net lease report put overall single-tenant asking cap rates at 6.82 percent, up two basis points on the quarter, with the dollar store sector at 7.49 percent and corporate QSR at 5.85 percent. Both their figures and ours measure asking cap rates, so the comparison is like for like.

At the tenant level, our inventory prices meaningfully inside the national benchmark:

Each row below matches our population to the population the benchmark actually covers — same tenant, and for the ground-lease row, same tenure.

Comparison	ANL live book	National asking benchmark	Difference
Dollar General	6.52% (47 listings)	7.15%	63 bps inside
Dollar Tree	6.90% (8 listings)	7.55%	65 bps inside
McDonald’s + Chick-fil-A, ground lease	4.19% (11 listings)	4.45%	26 bps inside

A note on that third row, because it is easy to get wrong. Boulder reports ground-lease McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A asking 4.45 percent — the lowest cap rate anywhere in their Q2 report, which means the most expensive, most aggressively bid product in the sector, not the cheapest. Boulder does not describe it as a floor, and we should not either. Matched properly — both tenants, ground lease only — our eleven comparable listings ask 4.19 percent, 26 basis points inside. Our McDonald’s book alone asks 3.89 percent across 29 listings of all tenures, but that is not the same population Boulder is measuring, and quoting it against 4.45 percent would overstate the gap by half.

We do not think a 26 basis point difference means our sellers are mispricing. We think it is a reminder that the tightest end of the net lease market is tighter than published national averages capture, because that product rarely reaches a broad market. It gets placed. The listings that make it into a national asking-rate survey are, by construction, the ones that did not sell quietly first. Eleven listings is a thin basis for that claim, and we will revisit it as the ground-lease sample grows.

At the sector level our dollar store book asks 6.65 percent against Boulder’s 7.49 percent. It would be convenient to write that 84 basis point gap off as tenant mix — Boulder’s sector figure includes Family Dollar at 8.75 percent nationally, and our live book holds 47 Dollar General and 8 Dollar Tree against just two Family Dollar listings. But repricing our own mix at Boulder’s own tenant benchmarks gives 7.26 percent, which splits the gap 23 basis points to mix and 61 to pricing. Roughly three-quarters of it is real price difference, not composition. That is the same story the tenant rows above already tell; the mix explanation is the smaller half. (For what it is worth, our two Family Dollar listings ask 8.83 percent — close to the national figure, but two deals is an anecdote, not a benchmark.)

Geography

Twelve states carry twenty or more live listings. They price across a 108 basis point range.

State	Listings	Average ask
Texas	170	5.62%
Florida	147	5.31%
North Carolina	66	5.86%
Georgia	50	5.91%
Tennessee	44	5.44%
Ohio	36	6.11%
Illinois	27	5.76%
California	26	5.03%
Indiana	24	5.77%
Pennsylvania	23	5.78%
Arizona	23	5.24%
Virginia	21	5.73%

Texas and Florida together hold 317 listings — 36 percent of the entire live book — and price 31 basis points apart. California and Arizona sit at the tight end of the table on modest sample sizes; Ohio sits at the wide end. We would treat the state-level numbers as directional rather than precise: state is a crude proxy for the thing that actually drives price, which is the corner, and a 26-listing California sample is carrying a lot of weight in that 5.03 percent.

What we would do with this

Three things follow from the data above, and we would say all three to a client on the phone this week.

One. If your hold period is under ten years, stop paying for term you will not use. The market is charging roughly 30 basis points to move from the ten-to-fifteen band to fifteen-plus. On a three million dollar deal that is roughly a hundred and seventy thousand dollars of additional price, paid for years you intend to sell into anyway.

Two. The sub-five-year band is where underwriting still pays. A 180 basis point spread inside the middle half of that band means the market has not settled on a price for re-leasing risk. Buyers who can actually assess a specific location’s renewal probability — traffic counts, rent-to-sales, the tenant’s own store-level performance — are being paid 150 basis points over the long end to do that work. Buyers who cannot should stay away from it entirely, because the same dispersion that creates the opportunity is what makes it dangerous.

Three. Do not shop the sector, shop the tenant. A buyer who decides they want “a QSR at a six” is describing Burger King, Sonic, and 7 Brew, and excluding Taco Bell, Starbucks, and Wendy’s. That is a portfolio decision made by accident. The sector label is the least informative field on the listing — and as the Yum! Brands comparison shows, even the parent company on the guarantee will not tell you where a deal prices.

What we are watching next week

This issue establishes the baseline. Four things in it are worth checking against next Monday’s numbers, and we will report each of them as a change rather than a level.

• Whether the term curve steepens or flattens. The 59 basis point step from sub-five-year into the five-to-ten band is the market’s current price on re-leasing risk. If that step widens, buyers are getting more cautious; if it narrows, yield-hunting is returning to the short end.
• Whether McDonald’s holds under 4 percent. Twenty-nine listings averaging 3.89 percent is the tightest pocket in the book, and the first place a shift in ground-lease demand would show up.
• The sub-five-year dispersion. A 180 basis point interquartile spread is unusually wide. If it narrows, the market is converging on a price for renewal risk — and the underwriting premium described above starts to close.
• Texas and Florida. They hold 36 percent of the book, so our own averages largely follow them. Thirty-one basis points apart today; watch whether that gap moves.

Methodology, and what changes next week

This report is built from the live inventory in the American Net Lease database as of August 16, 2026: 872 active single-tenant listings, every one carrying an asking cap rate stated by the listing broker. Duplicate and withdrawn listings are excluded. No cap rate in this report is derived, imputed, or estimated by us — where a broker did not state one, the listing is excluded from the pricing tables rather than filled in.

Remaining lease term is known on all 872. On 651 of them the listing broker states a term directly; on the other 221 we compute it from the stated lease expiration date, which is the more precise of the two. Both are used in the term curve above. An earlier version of this report banded only the 651 broker-stated listings while describing the result as covering all 872 — that understated the long end and overstated the spread, reporting 152 basis points where the full book gives 130. The figures here cover every live listing.

Two limits on what these numbers can tell you, stated plainly:

These are asking cap rates, not closed transactions. We are reporting what sellers are asking, not what buyers paid. Asking data leads the market and is available immediately, which is what makes a weekly cadence possible at all; it also runs tight to where deals actually clear. The national benchmarks we compare against are asking rates too, so the comparisons hold — but nothing in this report should be read as a transaction comp.

This is the first issue, so there is no change column. Our inventory reached its current depth over the past thirty days, which means we can tell you where the market is priced today but not yet how that moved from last week. Every issue from next Monday forward will carry week-over-week movement by sector, by tenant, and by term band, measured against this baseline. That is the number this report exists to produce, and this week’s edition is what makes it possible.

Questions on any figure here, or on how a specific asset prices against these curves, go to the team directly. Every number in this report is reproducible from our database on request.

ANL Research publishes every Monday. American Net Lease represents buyers of single-tenant net lease retail.