New York City Restaurants Just Lost $12.50 an Order to a New Delivery Fee Cap

A $50 Order, and the Restaurant Only Sees $28.50

A $50 delivery order comes in. The customer pays in full. But by the time the platform's commission, marketing fee, and card-processing charge come off the top, the restaurant might net as little as $28.50 — less than 60 cents on the dollar. That's not a worst-case scenario anymore. It's the new reality in New York City, where the City Council just let third-party delivery platforms charge restaurants nearly double what they could a year ago.

If you run a restaurant, bar, or café in NYC and use DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub, this change is already showing up in your deposits — whether or not you've noticed it yet.

From 23% to 43%: What Actually Changed

Back in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, New York City capped what delivery platforms could charge restaurants at 23% of the order total. It was meant to protect small restaurants that had no real alternative to delivery apps during lockdowns. DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats sued the city, arguing the cap amounted to an unconstitutional price control. Rather than fight it out in court, the city and the platforms settled in April 2025: the platforms agreed to drop their lawsuits, and in exchange, the City Council agreed to raise the cap.

The council delivered on that deal. Under the new law, platforms can now charge restaurants up to 43% in total fees, broken into four separate capped categories:

• Core delivery service: up to 15%
• Basic marketing and platform visibility: up to 5%
• Credit card processing: up to 3%
• "Enhanced services" (expanded delivery radius, premium promotional placement, and similar add-ons): up to 20%

The law took effect in stages, and platforms were required to notify their New York City restaurant partners of new service plans and updated fee structures by June 30, 2026. If you haven't gone back and actually read the new fee schedule your platform sent you, that's worth doing this week. The "enhanced services" tier is opt-in in name only if the default plan restaurants get bumped into already includes it.

The Math That Matters More Than the Headline Number

Going from a 23% cap to a 43% ceiling doesn't mean every order now costs a restaurant 43%. It means the ceiling moved, and platforms have more room to bundle the "enhanced" tier into what used to be a standard plan. Restaurants that don't check which tier they're enrolled in can end up paying for delivery radius expansion or promotional placement they never actually asked for.

Run the numbers on a $50 order and the range is stark:

• At the low end — 18% total, meaning 15% delivery plus 3% processing — the restaurant nets roughly $41.
• At the high end — the full 43% with the enhanced-services tier included — that same $50 order nets roughly $28.50.

That's a $12.50 swing on a single order, based entirely on which fee tier a restaurant happens to be enrolled in — before food cost, labor, rent, or anything else is factored in. Multiply that across a few hundred delivery orders a month, and the difference between reviewing your tier and not reviewing it is a material chunk of your monthly margin.

How to Record These Fees So You Actually See the Damage

The most common bookkeeping mistake with third-party delivery is recording only the net deposit as revenue. If a platform deposits $28.50 on a $50 order, that $28.50 is not "$28.50 in sales" — it's $50 of gross revenue minus $21.50 in expenses. Collapsing the two into a single number understates both your top-line sales and your delivery costs, which throws off everything downstream, from how you price your menu to how accurate your profit and loss statement actually is.

A cleaner structure separates the transaction into distinct lines:

• Gross delivery sales — the full menu price the customer paid, recorded as revenue.
• Delivery platform commission — the delivery, marketing, and enhanced-services percentages, recorded as a commission or fees expense.
• Card processing fee — the 3% processing cut, recorded separately, since it behaves differently at tax time than a marketing commission does.
• Promotions or discounts — if the platform ran a promotion funded by the restaurant, that belongs in its own contra-revenue or marketing-expense line, not folded into the commission.

Request the itemized payout report from each platform — DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub all provide one — and reconcile gross sales, fees, and the net deposit every pay period instead of trusting the lump-sum deposit total. It's also worth splitting delivery revenue into its own account in your chart of accounts, separate from dine-in or pickup, so that when fee structures shift again, you can see the margin impact immediately instead of discovering it three months later during a routine check of your business bank account.

Is It Time to Push Customers Toward Ordering Direct?

The higher ceiling has revived a conversation restaurant owners have been having since delivery apps first took off: is it cheaper to just take the order yourself? A direct order placed through your own website or a QR code on the table typically costs a restaurant a flat card-processing fee — often under 3% — instead of a bundled delivery-plus-marketing-plus-processing commission that can run 15 to 20 points higher.

That doesn't mean dropping third-party platforms entirely. They still bring order volume and discovery that a standalone restaurant website usually can't match on its own. But the math is worth running by order type, not once a year. If a meaningful share of your delivery volume comes from repeat customers who already know your restaurant, even a modest incentive to order direct — one that's still cheaper than the 43% cap — can move real margin back onto your books.

Watch Your City, Even If You're Not in New York

New York's settlement-driven cap increase isn't happening in a vacuum, and it likely won't be the last of its kind. Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco each put pandemic-era delivery fee caps in place, and several are facing similar legal pressure from platforms arguing the caps can't stand indefinitely. If your business operates in a city with an existing delivery fee cap, it's worth checking whether that cap is being challenged in court, sunsetting on its own schedule, or up for legislative review. The pattern in New York — litigation, then a settlement, then a higher negotiated cap — is becoming a template other cities appear likely to follow rather than a one-off case.

Separately, the Federal Trade Commission is also examining "unfair or deceptive fees" in food and grocery delivery more broadly, though that review is still in its early stages with no final rule or compliance deadline yet. For now, the actionable step for any NYC restaurant owner is the same one: pull your current delivery platform agreement, confirm which fee tier you're actually enrolled in, and decide whether that's the plan you want to keep paying for.

Photo by Rowan Freeman on Unsplash