How Restaurant Delivery App Commissions Work

A customer pays 1,000 for a biryani order on a delivery app. Your monthly statement shows a very different number arriving in the bank, and the lines in between are not always easy to follow. This article is for restaurant owners who want to understand exactly what sits between the order total and the payout, and to be able to read a marketplace rate card without a sales call.

All figures below come from the platforms’ own published pages or from named press reports, with dates. They change often, so treat them as a snapshot from October 2026 and check your own contract.

What “commission” is a percentage of

Marketplace commission is almost always a percentage of the order subtotal: the food and drink value before delivery fees, before the customer’s service or platform fee, and usually before tax. That is why two restaurants on the same tier can see different effective rates: one sells a lot of drinks with high margins, the other a lot of low-margin staples, but the percentage is blind to that.

Three other things are worth knowing before looking at any rate:

• Commission is not the only deduction. Payment processing is usually bundled into the marketplace’s fee, but paid promotions, sponsored listings and discount campaigns are charged on top, and you usually fund the discount yourself.
• The customer pays fees too, and those go to the platform. They do not reduce your commission.
• Tiers trade commission for visibility. The higher tiers generally promise more placement, wider delivery radius or inclusion in subscription programmes. Whether that is worth the extra points depends entirely on how much of the extra volume is genuinely new.

Published tiers in the United States

Both large US marketplaces publish tiered pricing on their merchant pages. The figures below were read from those pages in October 2026.

Platform	Delivery by the platform	Pickup	Self-delivery (your riders)
DoorDash	Basic 15%, Plus 25%, Premier 30%	6%	15%
Uber Eats	Lite 20%, Plus 25%, Premium 30%	7%	15%

Source: merchants.doordash.com/en-us/pricing and merchants.ubereats.com/us/en/pricing, both checked October 2026.

Two things stand out. First, pickup orders attract a far lower rate because the platform is only doing the matching, not the delivery. Second, self-delivery tiers at 15% show what the platform values its discovery at when it is not moving the food. That 15% is the number to compare against the cost of taking the same order on your own site.

Published rates in the United Kingdom

Just Eat’s partner sign-up page states a 14% commission on orders where you deliver yourself and 30% where Just Eat delivers for you (just-eat.co.uk/partner/signup, checked October 2026). Deliveroo does not publish a standard commission figure on its partner pages, so any number you see quoted for it is from a contract or a news report, not a public rate card.

Reported ranges in India

Neither Swiggy nor Zomato publishes a single commission rate; the figure is negotiated per restaurant and reported ranges vary by source. For attribution:

• Business Standard reported Swiggy “typically charges commissions ranging from 17-25 per cent” (15 August 2024).
• Verdict, citing NDTV Profit, reported Zomato commissions “vary between 10% and 28%” (1 September 2025).
• Business Standard reported Bernstein’s estimate of take rates at 18 to 20 per cent (11 June 2025).
• Inc42 quoted restaurant industry sources putting effective rates for some restaurants at 25% to 35% once other charges are included (9 June 2025).

On the customer side, Inc42 reported Zomato’s platform fee at ₹14.9 before GST and Swiggy’s at ₹17.58 including GST, both as of March 2026. Those fees are paid by the customer to the platform; they are not part of your commission, but they do affect what the customer compares your direct price against.

Gross versus net: a worked example

Here is a single order on a 25% tier, which sits in the middle of every table above. Figures are in rupees; the arithmetic is the same at any order value.

Line	Amount	Note
Food subtotal (what commission is charged on)	₹1,000	Customer also paid delivery and platform fees to the app
Commission at 25%	-₹250	Deducted before payout
Tax on the commission invoice	-₹45	Example at 18%, as applies to GST on service invoices in India; in India a restaurant on the 5% no-ITC scheme cannot claim this back. Check your own tax position.
Promotion funded by you (10% off on 1 in 4 orders, averaged)	-₹25	Only if you run offers
Net reaching your account	₹680	Before food cost, packaging and labour

On the same order through your own site, the deductions are the payment gateway fee and whatever delivery costs you. Using published standard rates as examples: Razorpay lists 2% per domestic transaction (pricing page updated May 2026), so the gateway line would be around ₹20 on this order, plus GST on that fee. Delivery is then either your rider’s cost or a partner’s trip fee, and you decide how much of that the customer pays. Tuckly adds no platform commission on direct orders; the pricing page shows every cost line.

That comparison is the whole argument for direct ordering, but it only holds for orders that would have reached you anyway. A new customer who found you on the app is still worth the commission.

A month of orders

Scale the single order up and the shape becomes clearer. Assume 600 marketplace orders a month at an average subtotal of 800 on a 25% tier.

	Monthly
Gross food value	480,000
Commission at 25%	120,000
Over a year	1,440,000

If a third of those orders are regulars who would order direct given a link and a reason, moving them saves roughly 40,000 a month in commission, less the gateway fee and delivery on those orders. Whether the number is that or half of that depends on your customers, which is why the commission calculator asks you for the share you expect to move rather than assuming all of it.

Reading your own rate card

When you look at your marketplace agreement, find these five things:

1. The base on which commission is calculated. Subtotal, or subtotal including packaging charges?
2. Which tier you are on, and what it buys. If the higher tier’s extra placement is not producing extra orders, the lower tier is a conversation worth having.
3. The payment processing treatment. Bundled, or a separate line?
4. Promotion funding. Who pays for the discounts the app pushes you to run?
5. Self-delivery rate. If you have riders, the self-delivery tier may be cheaper, but only if your riders have the capacity.

What to do next

Put your last three months of statements next to the tables above and work out your effective rate: total deductions divided by total food subtotal. Then run that rate, your order count and your average order value through the commission calculator. It shows the annual bill and lets you test a realistic share of orders moving to a direct channel, with the formula visible so you can argue with it.