How Much Should You Raise Your Menu Prices for DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub?

A delivery order is not the same as a dine-in order, and pricing it like one is how restaurants quietly lose money on every ticket. DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub charge a commission of 15% to 30% on the food. The average independent restaurant runs on a net margin of 3% to 5%. Do that arithmetic and the problem is obvious: at your in-store prices, a marketplace order can wipe out the entire profit on the plate and then some.

So yes, you almost certainly need to charge more on the delivery apps than you do in your dining room. The harder question is how much. Most operators reach for the wrong number, and it costs them on every order.

This is the honest math on delivery menu pricing: what the apps actually take, why "add 30% to cover a 30% commission" leaves you short, the markup that actually protects your margin, and the only real way out of the commission squeeze.

What DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub actually take

Each platform sells tiered plans. The higher the commission, the more marketing and reach the platform gives you. As of 2026:

• DoorDash: three Marketplace plans. Basic is 15%, Plus is 25%, and Premier is 30% on delivery orders. Pickup orders are a flat 6% on all three plans. - Uber Eats: up to 30% on its top marketplace tier, with lower-commission plans in the 15% to 25% range that trade away some in-app reach. - Grubhub: a Marketplace commission that runs anywhere from 5% to 40% depending on the plan and add-ons, plus a flat 10% on Grubhub Direct orders that come through your own website.

Those headline percentages are only part of the bill. The platforms layer on fees, run paid promotions you opt into, and bundle card processing inside the marketplace commission. Independent 2026 cost analyses put the real, all-in cost of a marketplace order at 30% to 40% of the ticket once everything is counted.

One nuance drives the math below: the commission is charged on the food subtotal, and on a marketplace order the platform also handles the card processing and the driver. So the cleanest way to think about pricing is one question. What do you need to charge so the money the platform actually pays you matches what you would have collected in-store?

Why "add 30% to cover a 30% commission" is the wrong move

The instinct is intuitive and wrong. If the app takes 30%, raise the price 30% and you are square. You are not, because the commission is charged on the new, higher price too.

Walk through a $12 burger. Your food cost is 30%, so the burger costs you $3.60 to make and earns you $8.40 in the dining room.

Sell that same burger on a 30% marketplace at your in-store price of $12. The platform keeps $3.60, you collect $8.40, and after the $3.60 in food cost your profit is $4.80. You just handed away 43% of the margin on that plate.

Now "cover it" by adding 30%, to $15.60. The platform's cut grows with the price: 30% of $15.60 is $4.68. You collect $10.92, and after food cost you are left with $7.32. Better, but still more than a dollar short of the $8.40 you make in-store. The markup never caught up, because the commission climbed right along with your price.

To actually match your dining-room margin, you need the platform to pay you the full $12 after its cut. That means pricing the burger at $12 divided by 0.70, which is $17.14. A 42.9% increase, not 30%.

The markup that actually protects your margin

There is a clean formula behind that example. To net the same on a marketplace order as you do in-store, raise the price by the commission divided by one minus the commission:

• A 15% commission needs about a 17.6% markup. - A 20% commission needs a 25% markup. - A 25% commission needs a 33.3% markup. - A 30% commission needs a 42.9% markup.

The gap between the commission and the markup it requires only widens as the rate climbs. That is the part most operators miss.

One honest caveat: this math keeps the platform's full payout and ignores the card-processing fee you would have paid on an in-store sale (roughly 2.6% plus a dime). Fold that back in and your true break-even markup is a hair lower. Treat these figures as the ceiling that fully protects margin, not as a number you are obligated to hit.

Should you mark up all the way? The trade-off nobody likes

Fully protecting your margin and keeping your customers are in tension. Raise a $12 burger to $17.14 and some price-sensitive delivery customers will balk, and the platform's own ranking tends to bury menus priced far above the local norm. So operators land in one of three places:

• Full markup: price to fully protect margin. This fits when delivery is straining your kitchen and you would rather have fewer profitable orders than many thin ones. - Partial markup: cover your food cost and part of the margin, and treat the rest as the price of marketing on a channel that brings you customers you would not otherwise reach. Most independents sensibly land here. - No markup: only defensible when delivery is pure incremental volume on a kitchen with spare capacity and idle labor. That is rarer than operators think.

Whatever you choose, make it a decision, not an accident. The way to do that is to know your real margin on each channel, which we will come back to.

Two practical notes. First, most platforms now let you set higher menu prices for delivery than you charge in-store, but your own agreement is the final word, so confirm yours before you assume it. Second, do not ambush your regulars. A short note that delivery-app prices reflect the platform's fees reads as honest, not greedy.

The real fix: own your direct ordering channel

Marking up is damage control. It makes a bad-margin channel less bad. It does not change the fact that you are renting access to your own customers at 15% to 30% a head.

The structural fix is a direct ordering channel: your own website or branded ordering page, where orders flow through your POS and you pay a flat monthly fee plus ordinary card processing instead of a marketplace commission. The savings are not small. A restaurant doing $10,000 a month in delivery is paying $1,500 to $3,000 a month in platform commissions. Direct ordering replaces almost all of that with a fixed fee, and you keep the customer's contact information instead of handing it to the app.

The winning pattern is to use the marketplaces for what they are genuinely good at, which is discovery, and to convert repeat delivery customers to your direct channel over time with an insert in the bag, a loyalty offer, or a better price than the app. Build the direct channel first. Treat the commission you pay on the marketplaces as an advertising budget, not a permanent tax. We walk through the rest of the restaurant technology stack, POS included, in our companion guide, How to Open a Restaurant in 2026.

You cannot manage a margin you cannot see

Here is why so many restaurants run delivery at a loss without realizing it: the POS adds the dine-in dollar and the DoorDash dollar together on the sales report, as if they were worth the same. They are not. After commission and food cost, an un-marked-up delivery order in our burger example earned $4.80 against the $8.40 it earned in the dining room. A little more than half the margin, for the same plate of food.

The fix is per-channel reporting. Your numbers should break out dine-in, takeout, your own online ordering, and each delivery marketplace separately, and the headline for each should be margin (revenue minus commission minus food cost), not gross sales. When you can see that a busy delivery night netted little more than half what the same dollars would have in the dining room, the pricing and promotion decisions make themselves.

Where Norvet MSP fits

Norvet MSP does not run your kitchen, but we build and maintain the infrastructure that makes profitable delivery possible: the network that keeps your delivery tablets and POS online during a Friday rush, the POS configuration that surfaces per-channel margin instead of burying it, and the direct online ordering integration that gets you off the commission treadmill. For the POS itself, we point hospitality operators to Tonic and know how to wire it into the rest of your systems.

If you run a restaurant in the Atlanta metro or Clayton County area, we offer a technology and margin assessment that looks at your delivery setup, your channel reporting, and your network. Call 888 598-7677 or visit norvetmsp.com to book it.