Most  small business experts and lenders agree that starting a franchise business is safer than starting an independent business. However franchise businesses do fail, and some fail quite regularly. However  there are some general franchise categories that do historically appear have lower failure rates than others. Its been my experience that service related franchises for example have a lower failure rate than fast food franchises. If you want to do more research you can view a list here of some well known franchises that have some of the lowest and highest failure rates according to SBA franchise loan default statistics.