Most Durham restaurants don't fail in year one. Here's what the permit data shows.

Data through Sept. 28, 2026. Source: Durham County Environmental Health.

You've probably heard that most new restaurants close within a year. Durham County's own records say otherwise. We went through every restaurant permit Durham County Environmental Health has on file, from 2015 through late September 2026. Here's what they show.

Durham has more restaurants than it did in 2015

At the end of 2014, Durham County had 679 active restaurant permits. As of Sept. 28, 2026, it has 778. That's a net gain of 99 restaurants, or about 15%.

Growth wasn't steady. Openings beat closings in 8 of the 11 full years. The strongest years were 2018 (+28) and 2025 (+23). Three years ended slightly in the red: 2015, 2021 and 2022, by two or fewer each. So far in 2026, openings are a little ahead: 47 to 43 through late September. If you're looking for somewhere new to try, our Durham restaurant deals page lists current offers around town.

Downtown led the growth

Downtown's 27701 ZIP code added more restaurants than any other part of the county. From 2015 through 2025, 159 restaurant permits opened there and 121 closed, for a net gain of 38. Counting 2026 so far, downtown went from 94 active restaurants at the end of 2014 to 138 today, an increase of almost half.

Next were 27705 and 27703, each up 19 over 2015–2025. The 27707 ZIP, which has the most restaurants in the county (149), gained 13. Research Triangle Park (27709) was the only ZIP with a sizable restaurant count that shrank, down 8.

A few places in the 27701 ZIP with active county permits that you can look up on ActiveDiner:

• Bull City Burger and Brewery
• Bull McCabe's Irish Pub
• China King Chinese Restaurant
• Devines Restaurant and Sports Bar
• Federal
• Geer St. Garden
• James Joyce Irish Pub
• Mellow Mushroom
• Toast
• Tobacco Road Sports Café

For more ideas across the county, see our list of the best restaurants in Durham for 2026.

Most new restaurants are still around after five years

To test the year-one claim, we followed every restaurant permit that opened in Durham County from 2015 through 2020, 378 in all, and counted how many had closed within one, three and five years of opening:

• Within 1 year: 30 of 378, about 8%
• Within 3 years: 98, about 26%
• Within 5 years: 148, about 39%

That means more than 9 in 10 new restaurants got past their first year, and about 6 in 10 were still open five years in. Today, 166 of those 378 permits (44%) are still active.

Those figures count every permit closure as a closure, so they overstate how many restaurants actually went out of business. When a restaurant changes owners, the county closes the old permit and issues a new one, even if the doors never shut. If we treat a closure as a continuation when a new permit under the same or a very similar name opened at the same address within 90 days, the five-year closure rate falls to about 33%.

Restaurants that did close also tended to have run for a while. For permits that closed in 2015 or later, the median permit had been open almost six years (5.8).

Many "closings" are really handovers

Of the 679 restaurant closings recorded since the start of 2015, 309 (46%) had a new food permit open at the same address within 90 days. In 140 of those cases, about 1 in 5 of all closings, the new permit carried the same or a very similar name. That usually means a new owner or a paperwork change, not a restaurant going away. These re-permits add one opening for each closing, so they don't change the net growth numbers above.

Looking for a specific place? Our list of closed restaurants in Durham shows when each one’s county permit closed and, where we know it, what opened in its place.

What these numbers can and can't tell you

• Permits aren't businesses. A new owner means a new permit, so a single restaurant can show up as both a closing and an opening on the same day.
• 2026 is a partial year. The data runs through Sept. 28, 2026.
• Closing dates lag. A permit's closing date is when the county closed the file, which can be weeks or months after the last meal was served.
• What's counted: only Durham County permits of type "1 - Restaurant." Food trucks, food stands, school cafeterias and temporary event permits aren't included, and neither are restaurants in the parts of Chapel Hill, Morrisville or RTP that fall in other counties. Permits carrying the system's placeholder opening date of July 1, 1990, were left out of the lifespan figures.

Source: Durham County Environmental Health, restaurant permit data via data.dconc.gov (data through Sept 28, 2026).