Restaurant Delivery Commissions: What They Really Cost

A customer orders €28 of food from your kitchen. When the platform’s payout lands, you keep €18 of it — sometimes less. You never saw the difference leave: it dissolved into a percentage you don’t sign off on and never check, order after order. That’s the delivery commission, and it’s probably the most underestimated cost line in the restaurant business in 2026.

On food cost you fight for every point. On labor you build schedules with a scale. But delivery commissions — which on a single order can be worth as much as, or more than, what you take home — sit in the dark: unmeasured, rarely negotiated, never really understood. This article puts them on paper. We’ll cover who actually delivers in 2026, how the commission is built, what the percentage applies to, what you pay beyond it, and why — if you don’t run the numbers — delivery can lose money without you noticing.

How the commission is built (and what it applies to)

“Commission” isn’t one number: it depends on how much work the platform does. Simplifying, there are two models.

1. Full service. The platform brings you customers, processes payment, puts you in the app’s storefront and — crucially — delivers with its own couriers. It’s the package most restaurants use, and the most expensive. In the US, DoorDash’s published plans run 15% (Basic) / 25% (Plus) / 30% (Premier) on the subtotal. Uber Eats, after its March 2026 fee increase, sits at 20% / 25% / 30%. In the UK, Deliveroo and Just Eat full service typically land at 25-30%, with the broader range running 14-35%.

2. Marketplace only. The platform sends you the order and collects payment, but you deliver with your own drivers. It costs far less — toward 14-18% — and you keep the logistics margin, but you take on vehicles, riders, insurance and timing.

What does the percentage apply to? Almost always the order subtotal — the food in the cart — not tax or tips. Whether it also covers the customer-facing delivery fee varies by contract: that’s one of the first lines to read.

The VAT almost nobody counts (UK/EU)

A detail that escapes many operators: in the UK and EU, the commission itself is subject to VAT (20% in the UK). So a 25% headline rate is closer to 30% in cash. If you’re VAT-registered you reclaim it, so it’s not a net cost — but it hits your working capital, and for anyone on a flat-rate or exempt scheme it becomes a full cost. The rule holds for every digital fee: the headline percentage is never the whole story, and the statement has to be read line by line — the same discipline you bring to your food cost.

The hidden costs beyond the percentage

Stop at the headline rate and you’ll underestimate. A ring of smaller costs surrounds the commission and, added up, moves the math:

• Marketing and sponsored listings. Your position in the app’s list isn’t neutral: to rank — or not to vanish beneath competitors — you pay for sponsored placement and campaigns. Some platforms also add a flat marketing fee per order on top of the discount you fund.
• Promotions you finance. The “free delivery” and “20% off” deals you see in the app are often paid for by the restaurant, not the platform.
• Payment processing. On some plans (Grubhub, for example) card processing of ~3% plus a fixed fee per order stacks on the marketing commission.
• Packaging. Included in nothing: containers, bags and seals are entirely on you, order by order. We dig into this in designing a menu and prices for delivery.
• Refunds and errors. Disputed refunds and delivery problems frequently fall on the restaurant, under terms the platform defines.

Layer packaging, promos, processing and refunds onto a 15-30% headline and industry analyses put the true cost at 35-45% of the order. None of these line items ruins you alone. Together, they do.

What’s left: the eroded margin

Here’s the part that stings. The commission doesn’t replace your other costs — it stacks on them.

Average restaurant net margins run just 3-9%. A 15-30% commission is therefore often larger than the entire profit on the meal. And it’s worse than it looks: a Stanford analysis found that only 30-50% of delivery sales are genuinely incremental — the rest cannibalizes higher-margin dine-in and direct orders that you’d have captured anyway.

Run the back-of-napkin math on a €100 order:

• €25-30 goes to commission.
• €30-35 to ingredients.
• €25-30 to labor.
• A few euros are left — and you haven’t paid rent, utilities or packaging yet.

On many orders, the platform makes more than you do. That’s not rhetoric; it’s arithmetic. Which is why delivery isn’t something you “accept” — it’s something you calculate, order by order. In the companion piece, the real margin per order, an interactive calculator breaks down a single delivery and tells you the commission rate at which your margin hits zero.

Who actually delivers in 2026

A quick map, because the landscape just reshuffled at the top — through M&A, not market exits.

• DoorDash acquired the entire Deliveroo group in 2025 (a ~£2.9bn deal, completed in October 2025), extending its reach into the UK and Europe. Deliveroo keeps operating under its own brand.
• Prosus acquired Just Eat Takeaway.com the same year (a €4.1bn all-cash deal, settled October 2025), taking the group private.
• In the US, the big three remain DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub; in the UK, Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats.

Why does ownership matter to you? Because consolidation reduces the competitive pressure that might otherwise keep commissions in check — and it makes knowing your own numbers, and your own channels, more important, not less.

Don’t wait for a cap

A widespread hope worth dispelling: commission caps aren’t coming to save you.

Several US cities capped third-party fees at 15% during the pandemic, but the flagship “permanent” caps were diluted. After a June 2025 settlement, New York City kept a 15% core-delivery floor but now lets platforms charge up to 43% once optional services are bundled in; San Francisco similarly allows 15-30%. No hard all-in ceiling survives in any major US market, and the UK has no cap at all. If you’re waiting for a law to lower your commission, you’ll be waiting a long time.

The relief won’t come from regulation. It comes from what you decide — on pricing, on the menu, and on how much traffic you hand to the platform instead of keeping for yourself.

In short

Delivery commissions are a real, heavy cost line: 15-30%+ for full service, 14-18% if you deliver yourself, with marketing fees, promotions, processing, VAT (in the UK/EU) and packaging thickening the picture — a true cost often nearer 35-45%. The top of the market has consolidated under DoorDash and Prosus, no cap is on the horizon, and stacked on food cost the commission can swallow nearly all your margin. That’s why delivery belongs in the same bucket as your food cost, your booking and reservation fees and your card and payment fees — the other sides of the same triangle eating your digital margin.

From here the cluster continues: the real margin order by order, how to cut or eliminate commissions with direct delivery, and how to design a menu and prices built for delivery. For the full view of the digital costs eroding your margins, start from your KPI dashboard.

Coperti is the reservation and floor-management system born from the experience of people who ran a restaurant for years. We don’t process your payments and we don’t run delivery: we give you control over the numbers that decide your margins — covers, average ticket, revenue per service — so you make cost calls on data, not gut feel. Tell us about your restaurant: the trial is free and lasts 30 days.