Uber Eats and DoorDash Just Made Delivery More Expensive — Here’s What It Means for Your Margins
If your delivery orders feel less profitable than they used to, it’s not just you. Uber Eats has raised commission rates on two of its three pricing tiers, and the industry expects others to follow. Here’s what actually changed, what it’s costing you, and how to keep more of what you earn.
Key numbers:
- 20% — New Uber Eats Lite-tier commission, up from 15%
- 25–35% — Typical blended cost once fees, processing and promos are added
- +5% — Extra surcharge on Plus-tier orders from Uber One members
What actually changed
In March 2026, Uber Eats quietly updated its restaurant fee schedule. The change hits two of its three pricing tiers: the Lite tier, previously 15%, moved up to 20%. The Plus tier holds at 25%, but now carries an extra 5% charge on orders placed by Uber One members — pushing the effective rate to 30% on a growing slice of a restaurant’s most frequent customers. The Premium tier stays at 30%, and restaurants on custom-negotiated rates are seeing increases too, capped at 30% overall.
DoorDash and Grubhub haven’t announced matching increases as of this writing, but they’ve held similar territory for a while — DoorDash’s tiers sit at roughly 15%, 25% and 30% for delivery, plus around 6% on pickup orders. Grubhub’s structure runs lower on paper but adds a delivery commission and processing fee on top, landing in a similar range once everything is counted.
Commission comparison:
Platform | Entry tier | Mid tier | Top tier Uber Eats | 20% | 25% (+5% Uber One) | 30% DoorDash | 15% | 25% | 30% Grubhub | ~15%* | ~20%* | ~25%*
*Grubhub’s marketing commission is layered with a separate delivery fee and processing charge, so the all-in cost typically lands close to the other two platforms. Rates vary by market, plan and negotiated terms — confirm current pricing with your rep before making decisions.
What this actually costs you
A percentage point or two doesn’t sound like much until you run it against real volume. A restaurant doing 650 marketplace orders a month at a $25 average ticket is moving roughly $195,000 a year in delivery sales. At a blended cost around 30%, that’s close to $58,000 a year handed to the platforms — against a typical restaurant’s full-year profit margin of just 3–4% of total sales.
Put plainly: on a lot of delivery orders, the platform keeps more of the sale than you do.
And it compounds. Many operators track delivery and dine-in revenue as if they’re worth the same on a sales report. They’re not — after commission and food cost, a delivery order routinely nets a fraction of what the same order earns walking through your front door.
How to protect your margin
You don’t have to walk away from delivery apps — they’re genuinely useful for getting new customers in the door. The fix is to stop treating them as your only channel and start building the one you actually own.
- Push direct ordering. A branded ordering option on your own website or through a QR code at the table costs you a flat processing fee, not a 20–30% cut of the sale.
- Use your POS data. Real-time reporting tells you which items are worth promoting on your own channel instead of paying the platform to feature them.
- Turn app customers into repeat customers. A discount code or loyalty offer in the delivery bag nudges people to order direct next time.
- Treat commission as a marketing spend, not a fixed cost. Use the apps for discovery, then measure how many of those customers you can move to a channel where you keep the margin.
The bottom line
- Uber Eats raised Lite and Plus-tier commissions in March 2026 — DoorDash and Grubhub haven’t matched it yet, but rates across all three sit between 15% and 30%.
- The real, all-in cost after processing and promotions usually lands between 25% and 35% of the order.
- The strongest long-term move is building a direct ordering channel so fewer of your sales are taxed by a third party