McDonald’s Dedication to Helping Uphold Human Rights

When it comes to the people that make McDonald’s possible – our customers, employees, Franchisees, communities and suppliers – one thing is non-negotiable: respect for human rights.

We consider human rights in everything we do. Here are just two examples of how we reinforced this in 2025.

Strengthening Our Youth Rights Approach

McDonald’s achieved a score of 7.8/10 in the Children’s Rights Benchmark, up 1.9 points from 2024

One of our human rights focus areas is creating safe, suitable workplaces for young people and mitigating child labor risks. In 2025, McDonald’s efforts in these areas contributed to achieving a score of 7.8/10 in the Global Child Forum’s 2025 Children’s Rights Benchmark – up 1.9 points on the previous year and 2.1 points above the food industry average.

In 2025, we also undertook work to identify areas to further strengthen our efforts. Through a holistic assessment, we pinpointed five priority child rights-related areas:

• Preventing child labor in our supply chains
• Combining health and taste within children’s nutrition
• Safe and suitable work for minors in restaurants
• Responsible marketing to children
• Providing a safe space for young customers

While no critical gaps were identified, the assessment uncovered valuable insights that were shared with relevant McDonald’s teams to inform future work.

To support child labor prevention in our supply chains, we expect our suppliers to ensure no underage labor, as defined in our Supplier Code of Conduct (PDF – 102 KB), has been used in the production or distribution of their goods or services.

At industry level, in 2025, we supported the expansion of the AIM-Progress child labor prevention toolkit to help U.S. suppliers identify and address child labor-related risks in U.S. manufacturing. Together with the Centre for Child Rights and Business, AIM-Progress members developed two new resources.

In 2025, we also prioritized increasing our understanding of how markets are safeguarding young workers in restaurants. To do so, we gathered feedback from over 30 market leaders and analyzed a range of internal and external resources to understand how markets engage with and protect youth in the workplace. Positive initiatives were found globally – from proactively engaging with parents and family members of youth employees to establishing “buddy systems.”

Doing Our Due Diligence for the FIFA Men’s World Cup 2026

In our role as a sponsor, McDonald’s conducted robust human rights due diligence ahead of the tournament

Major sporting events can create powerful moments of global celebration, bringing fans, communities and cultures together around shared experiences and values. At the same time, these events are not without risk, as they can be connected to heightened human rights issues including worker welfare, child safeguarding and local community impacts. It’s a point of importance for McDonald’s to act as a responsible sponsor, doing what we can to help ensure sport is delivered in ways that respect people and contribute to a positive, lasting legacy.

As an official sponsor of the FIFA Men’s World Cup 2026, we laid the groundwork for an event that’s both fun and fair by undertaking a series of steps – beginning in 2025 – to identify and help mitigate potential human rights-related risks.

To start, McDonald’s human rights and security leads were included in the McDonald’s cross-functional FIFA 26 sponsorship team. Led by Global Marketing, this team exists to promote close collaboration and help embed risk insights and mitigation measures across operational considerations.

We conducted a range of information gathering activities. For example, through a 2025 human rights assessment across 16 host cities, we engaged subject matter experts – including civil society, FIFA Security, FIFA Human Rights, government partners, and other sponsors’ security and human rights leads – to help identify and prepare for mitigation of potentially heightened human rights risks. This sort of stakeholder engagement was key to gathering strategic insights and further supporting due diligence and risk monitoring.

In addition to providing operational and advisory support across McDonald’s teams, we developed optional guidance to enable readiness at scale. As with past World Cups, the guidance equipped McDonald’s operating in host markets with information about which human rights issues could be heightened by the tournament. It also shared insights on how teams could best prepare their people, especially those working at restaurants near event venues, to safely enjoy the celebration of community and sport that FIFA brings.