Iceland Is One Of The Few Places Without This Famous American Fast Food Chain

With more than 40,000 operating locations worldwide, McDonald's is one of the biggest fast food chains on Earth. In the United States, it seems like there's a Mickey D's on almost every corner. Considering its popularity and wide global expansion, you might think there isn't a country on the planet that doesn't play host to this fast food giant — but you'd be wrong. One nation that doesn't have a single, solitary Golden Arches anywhere on its turf is Iceland.

Per McDonald's corporate website, the restaurant brand operates in more than 90 countries. Iceland, however, is conspicuously not one of them. Iceland is a fairly small nation — just shy of 400,000 total residents as of 2023, per data from the World Health Organization. To put that in perspective, the city of Las Vegas is home to just over 670,000 as of 2025 — funny enough, the City of Lights also houses 72 McDonald's locations. Clearly, it's not Iceland's small size that has kept McDonald's out. So then, why the lack of Golden Arches? 

McD's did once have a presence in Iceland. In the 1990s, a few branches of the restaurant opened in Reykjavik, the country's capital city. But a meat shortage in Iceland later necessitated importing ingredients from Germany, bringing with them high import taxes that caused McDonald's local prices to significantly increase. The worldwide economic crisis of 2008, coupled with a subsequent economic crash in Iceland and the collapse of the local currency, made operating the brand even more financially difficult. These factors ultimately finished off the franchise in that country. By late 2009, the existence of Icelandic McDonald's was nothing but a memory.

Iceland isn't the only country where McDonald's famous fries — its best-selling menu item — and its cooked-fresh-not-frozen Quarter Pounder are nowhere to be found. A few other prominent nations are bereft of the Golden Arches and its world-famous quick service menu. Some are small in terms of population, like Iceland, but others have huge numbers of residents, making the restaurant's absence in those countries more surprising.

Greenland is even smaller in terms of residents than its neighbor, Iceland — with a population of 56,000 and some change as of 2023, according to Info Norden – and similarly has no McDonald's in residence. More highly populated countries like Iran, Zimbabwe, and Yemen also have no Mickey D's.

A surprising member of the McDonald's-less list is Russia. With more than 145 million people, this nation initially welcomed McD's in 1990, when the first branch of the restaurant debuted in Moscow. It was the culmination of a long effort on McDonald's behalf to forge good relations with the country. During the 1976 Olympics, Mickey D's held out an olive branch by volunteering to shuttle Russian participants around in its Big Mac Bus. This gesture blossomed into negotiations that ultimately resulted in the opening of McDonald's restaurants in Russia more than a decade later. However, the advent of the Russia-Ukraine war prompted the fast food giant to pull out of the country entirely in 2022. The former Russian McDonald's locations were sold to a new owner, who has reopened under new branding that is no longer tied to McDonald's.