How Much of Your Delivery Revenue Are You Actually Keeping?

Most operators know there's a commission. What many don't fully understand is the range and what's layered on top of it.

Here's the current standard (rack rate) commission structure across the major platforms, as reported by Food On Demand and KitchenHub's marketplace breakdown:

DoorDash

• Basic plan: 15%
• Plus plan: 25%
• Premier plan: 30%
• Pickup orders: 6%

Uber Eats (updated March 2026)

• Lite plan: 20% (raised from 15% in March 2026)
• Plus plan: 25% standard, 30% on orders from Uber One members
• Premium plan: 30%
• Pickup orders: 7% (with validated in-store pricing)

It's worth flagging: Uber Eats raised commission rates in March 2026 — the first change in approximately 10 years — with the Lite tier rising from 15% to 20%. DoorDash and Grubhub have not matched this increase as of writing. If you're on Uber Eats, now is an unusually good time to review your plan tier and renegotiate if you have the volume to support it.

Grubhub

• Starter: 5%
• Basic: 15%
• Plus: 20%
• Pickup: 12% (marketing commission, delivery fee added separately)

These are rack rates — what you pay if you signed the standard agreement or if your negotiated rate has lapsed. The commission comes off the top of every order. On a $30 order at 30%, that's $9 gone before you've looked at anything else.

Credit Card Processing Fees

Most platforms charge processing fees separately from commission — typically around 2.9–3.5% per transaction according to ActiveMenus' fee breakdown. On that same $30 order, that's roughly another $0.90–$1.05. It adds up fast at scale.

Marketing Fees

When you run a promotion through the platform — a percentage-off offer, a BOGO, free delivery — the platform may charge a per-redemption fee on top of commission. DoorDash currently applies a $0.99 marketing fee to all marketing-driven orders, including both ads and promotions. Uber Eats has introduced similar per-redemption fees on promoted offers.

Per-order fees look small in isolation. At 200 promotional orders a week, they add $800+/month to your cost structure that many operators never attribute to their delivery P&L.

Integration Tools

If you're using middleware to connect your POS to the delivery platforms (tools like Olo, Deliverect, or ItsaCheckmate), that's typically $50–$249/month per location, per KitchenHub's marketplace analysis. For multi-location brands, this is a real line item.

Promo Funding

When you run a discount — say, 25% off — you're funding part or all of that discount out of your margin. Some campaigns are co-funded (the platform absorbs a portion), but many are fully operator-funded. If you don't know which type you're running, you should find out immediately.

Let's put together the full math on a realistic scenario. This is the order that's quietly destroying margin for thousands of operators every day.

The setup: $30 ticket. Premier plan at 30% commission. Running a 25% off promo (operator-funded). Customer found you through a paid ad ($6 cost-per-order, a typical mid-performing campaign result).

You lost money on that order. Not counting labor, rent, or utilities.

This isn't a fringe scenario. As CloudKitchens notes in their delivery fee analysis, if a restaurant operates with a 10–15% profit margin and pays a 30% commission before any promo or ad costs, the math frequently goes negative on promoted orders. The operators who survive this environment are the ones who understand which orders are profitable and structure their campaigns accordingly.

1. Negotiate your commission rate

If you haven't revisited your commission agreement in the last 12 months, or if you've grown meaningfully in volume since you signed, it may be time to renegotiate. This is especially true right now: Restaurant Business Online reports that DoorDash and Grubhub have held their rates steady while Uber Eats raised theirs — creating negotiating leverage if you can credibly threaten to shift volume.

2. Know which promos are co-funded and which aren't

Before you launch any promotional offer, know exactly who's paying for the discount. Run the unit economics before you activate, not after.

3. Stop running ads and aggressive promos to the same customers simultaneously

When a customer finds you through a paid ad and redeems a promotional discount in the same order, you're stacking costs on both sides. The math frequently puts you in the red. More on the right segmentation approach in a separate post.

4. Audit your plan tier against your actual usage

If you're on a Premium (30%) plan but not actively using the enhanced features, consider whether you're paying for capabilities you're not extracting value from.

Your blended cost per order — the total of all delivery-related costs divided by your total delivery orders — is the number that tells you whether your delivery channel is profitable or just busy.

Most operators can pull the raw numbers from their platform dashboards. What they often don't do is combine them into one clean calculation. If you haven't built this view yet — even a simple spreadsheet tracking commission, processing, marketing fees, and promo costs per platform per month — that's the first thing worth building. Once you can see that number clearly, every other decision becomes measurably easier to make.

Keep exploring practical ways to improve delivery platform performance, margin, and visibility.