What a Delivery App Is Allowed to Charge You — and the Bucket Most Owners Never Read

Most owners sign up to a delivery platform, see a commission percentage in the contract, and assume that number is set by the market. In one of the biggest markets in the country it is set by law instead — and the law is both more specific and more generous to the platform than the headline suggests.

There are two things worth knowing before you next open a statement. The cap is not one number, it is four, and most summaries of the law only mention three. And the difference between the tier you are on and the tier you are entitled to be offered can be worth fifteen points of margin on every order you take.

This is what the city’s own enforcement agency publishes, current as of 1 October 2026.

What New York City actually caps

New York City made its fee caps permanent in 2021. The City Council’s own description of the legislation at the time was that it prohibits services from charging restaurants “more than 15% per order for delivery and more than 5% per order for all other fees, except for transaction fees.”

That is the sentence almost every article about these caps quotes, and it is where most coverage stops. It is also five years old.

The current rules are published by the agency that enforces them, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. On DCWP’s requirements page for delivery apps, the caps are set out as four separate buckets:

DCWP states each one in terms. “Delivery fees are capped at 15% of the purchase price of each online order.” “Transaction fees are capped at 3% of the purchase price of each online order.” “Basic service fees are capped at 5% of the purchase price of each online order.” And the one that rarely makes it into a summary: “Enhanced service fees are capped at 20% of the purchase price of each online order.”

Each of those is published with the qualifier “with limited exceptions.”

The fourth bucket is the one that costs you

Put the buckets together and the picture changes depending on which service tier you are on.

A store on a basic plan faces capped fees of 15% delivery, 5% basic service and 3% transaction. That is 23% of the order at the maximum the law allows — the arithmetic on DCWP’s three figures.

A store on an enhanced plan faces 15% delivery, 20% enhanced service and 3% transaction. That is 38%.

Fifteen points of difference, on every order, decided by which tier you signed up to — and the enhanced tier is the one the platform’s sales conversation is designed to move you onto, because it is the one that buys you placement.

Neither number is a platform behaving badly. Both are inside the caps. That is the point worth absorbing: the cap is not a promise that your bill will be small. It is a ceiling on each of four separate charges, and the ceilings are not the same height.

The plan you are entitled to be offered

Here is the protection that sits underneath the enhanced tier, and it is the single most useful sentence on DCWP’s site for an owner.

On DCWP’s page for restaurants using delivery apps: “the enhanced service fee can only be charged if the app offers a plan at a basic service fee amount.”

Read that slowly. A platform may charge you the 20% enhanced service fee only if it also offers you a plan at the basic rate. The enhanced tier has to be a choice, not the only door.

So if you are being charged an enhanced service fee, you are entitled to have been offered a basic-rate alternative. If you were never shown one, that is a question to put to the platform in writing, and a matter DCWP takes complaints about.

This is the practical version of the rule: the law guarantees you an option, not a price. Whether you take the cheaper option is commercial — the enhanced tier may genuinely pay for itself in volume. But you should be choosing it against a real alternative, with both numbers in front of you, rather than discovering the tier you are on when you read a statement.

Reading a statement in four buckets

Most owners look at a delivery statement and see one number: what landed in the bank versus what the orders totalled. That tells you the damage but not the cause, and it is not a number you can challenge.

Take a $20 order and put DCWP’s published caps against it.

Both columns are lawful. The difference is $3.00 an order, and on forty delivery orders a week that is $6,240 a year.

The exercise worth doing once, with a real statement in front of you, is to sort every charge into one of the four buckets and work out the percentage each represents of the order value — not of the payout, of the order value. Three things fall out of it:

1. Which tier you are actually on. If your service charges are running near 20% rather than near 5%, you are on an enhanced plan whether or not you remember agreeing to one.
2. Whether anything sits outside the buckets. Marketing, promotion and placement charges belong in a service bucket. They do not each get their own allowance.
3. Whether the transaction line is above the capped rate. If it is, the platform needs to justify it — see below.

The transaction cap is rebuttable, and the burden is on the platform

Of the four buckets the City Council and DCWP set out, the transaction cap is the one with an explicit escape hatch — and the escape hatch has conditions.

Per the City Council, a service may not charge “more than 3% per order for transaction fees, except that it would allow for a higher charge if the third-party food delivery service could provide proof upon request to both DCWP, and the relevant food service establishment, that such higher fee reflects a pass-through charge imposed by a credit card company or internet-based payment system.”

Two details in that sentence do work for you. The proof has to go to both DCWP and to you — not to the regulator alone. And it has to show an actual pass-through from a card company or payment system, not a general cost of doing business.

So a transaction charge above the capped rate is not automatically wrong, but it is automatically questionable, and you are entitled to ask for the document.

What the app owes you that is not about price

Three more obligations published by DCWP are worth knowing, because they are the ones owners most often do not realise they can insist on.

There has to be a written agreement. “Apps must have a written agreement with your restaurant to list it on the app.” A listing that appeared without you signing anything is not a grey area — it is a listing that should not exist. This matters more than it sounds: stores are sometimes listed by a platform without their knowledge, with prices the store did not set.

They cannot charge more than the caps. “Apps cannot charge your restaurant more than the fee caps.” Plain, and it is the sentence a complaint rests on.

Phone orders that do not end in a sale are not chargeable. “Apps cannot charge your restaurant for phone orders that do not end with a sale.” If your statement carries per-call charges, check what proportion converted.

And the app itself needs a licence. Per DCWP’s requirements page: “You must have a Third-Party Food Delivery Service license if you operate any website, mobile application, or other internet service that offers or arranges for the sale and same-day delivery or pickup of food and beverages prepared by a food service establishment (for example, a restaurant) in New York City that you do not own.” That is an obligation on the platform, not on you, but it is checkable — and an unlicensed service operating in the city is something DCWP wants to hear about.

What to do if the numbers do not match

The route is unglamorous and it works better than an email to a support address.

1. Pull three months of statements and sort every line into the four buckets.
2. Express each bucket as a percentage of order value. Not of payout. Payout is net of everything and hides the ratio.
3. Put anything above a cap in writing to the platform, naming the bucket and the capped rate, and asking either for the charge to be corrected or — for a transaction charge — for the pass-through proof.
4. If you are paying an enhanced service fee, ask in writing what the basic plan is and what it costs. You are entitled to have been offered one.
5. If it is not resolved, file with DCWP. The agency takes complaints from restaurants online about unlicensed apps and about violations of restaurant rights.

Keep the correspondence. A platform relationship is a commercial one, and the store that can produce three months of bucketed numbers is in a different conversation from the store that says the fees feel high.

Whether the cap protects you at all

This is where a convenience store has to read carefully, because the law is written around prepared food.

The Council defines a third-party food delivery service as “any website, mobile application or other internet service that: (i) offers or arranges for the sale of food and beverages prepared by, and the same-day delivery or same-day pickup of food and beverages from, a food service establishment; and (ii) that is owned and operated by a person other than the person who owns such food service establishment.”

Read the phrase “prepared by … a food service establishment.” A bodega with a deli counter, a grill or a coffee programme is selling prepared food. A store listed purely as convenience or grocery, moving packaged goods, is a different proposition — and platforms commonly onboard those stores under a separate vertical with its own commercial terms.

If you run both — a deli and a shelf of packaged goods — establish in writing which category your listing sits in, because that is what decides whether any of this applies to your bill. If you are setting a store up on a platform for the first time, our guide to putting your bodega on Uber Eats covers the onboarding side of that decision.

Caps are local, and the law moves

This is a New York City law. Most of the country has no cap at all, which means the percentage in your contract is the percentage and it is negotiable only commercially. Several other cities adopted caps during the pandemic and many of those were temporary measures that have since lapsed.

There is a second lesson in the gap between the Council’s 2021 description and DCWP’s current page. The 2021 press release describes three buckets. DCWP publishes four. The law was amended in between. If you are checking your own city, check the enforcing agency’s current page rather than the press release announcing the law — the announcement is a historical document and the agency page is the live one.

The decision the arithmetic drives

Take the capped maximum on a basic plan — 23% of the order, on DCWP’s figures — and you are down $4.60 on a $20 order before you have bought a single ingredient. What is left has to cover food cost, packaging, the labour to assemble it, and the container it leaves in. Packaging for delivery is heavier and costlier than a bag over the counter.

That is the arithmetic that drives the next decision.

Pricing for the app is a real choice

Platforms generally allow you to set in-app prices higher than your in-store prices. Owners split into two camps and both positions are defensible.

Price the same everywhere. Simple, honest-looking to the customer, and it protects you from a regular who notices the difference. It also means the commission comes straight out of your margin on every delivery order.

Price up in the app. Recovers some or all of the commission. The risks are equally real: your prices become less competitive in a listing where the customer is comparing you against the shop next door, and a customer who sees both prices may feel misled.

NRS has already come down on one side of this in its July guide to putting your bodega on Uber Eats, which gives the number: “Most experienced operators price delivery items 15-to-25 percent above in-store shelf price to offset the platform commission. This is a standard practice across the industry and customers generally understand that delivery commands a premium.” It also sets the condition that makes it work — “The key is consistency: if some items are marked up and others are not, the pricing looks arbitrary and customers notice.”

That advice holds, and the arithmetic above is the argument for the top of its range rather than the bottom. Marking up does not recover the commission one-for-one, because the commission is charged on the marked-up price too. On a basic plan at the 23% cap, a 15% markup recovers about half of what the commission costs you and a 25% markup about five sixths; getting back to your in-store margin takes roughly 30%. On an enhanced plan at 38%, a 25% markup recovers about two fifths, and full recovery needs a markup near 60% — which no listing survives.

So this piece is the fuller trade-off behind that number. The markup is the right default, it is not free, and at the enhanced tier no markup inside a sane range gets you whole. Which is why the tier matters more than the pricing decision: check which plan you are on, and whether you were offered the basic one you are entitled to, before you reprice the menu.

Whichever way you go, the wrong way to decide is not to decide — and to discover a year later that delivery has been your least profitable channel the whole time.

Two things make the decision properly:

1. Know your true delivery cost per order, including packaging and the labour minutes to assemble, not just the commission percentage.
2. Know whether delivery is adding customers or moving them. An order from someone who would have walked in is worth less to you than the same order from someone who would not.

What the POS can tell you, and what it cannot

Delivery orders that arrive on a tablet and get keyed into the register separately are the ones that distort your numbers, because the channel is invisible in your own reporting.

The practical step is to make the channel visible: ring delivery so it is distinguishable from counter sales, so the question “what did this channel actually earn” has an answer at all. The NRS POS includes downloadable sales reports. Orders that arrive on a platform’s own tablet are the ones that never reach your reporting at all, which is the harder half of the problem and worth solving before you start counting.

What no system can do is tell you whether a delivery customer would otherwise have walked through the door. That is a judgement, informed by whether your counter trade moved in the same period.

Frequently asked questions

How many fee caps are there — three or four? Four. DCWP publishes caps on delivery (15%), transaction (3%), basic service (5%) and enhanced service (20%). Summaries that list three are usually working from the 2021 Council press release.

What is an enhanced service fee? The upgraded service tier, capped at 20% rather than the 5% basic rate. DCWP states it “can only be charged if the app offers a plan at a basic service fee amount” — so it has to be offered alongside a basic option, not instead of one.

How do I tell which tier I am on? Sort a statement into the four buckets and express each as a percentage of order value. Service charges running near 20% rather than near 5% mean an enhanced plan.

Is there a cap where I am? Probably not. New York City’s caps are a local law. Several other cities adopted caps, many of which were temporary pandemic measures that have lapsed. Check your own city’s enforcing agency rather than assuming.

Does the cap apply to a convenience store? It turns on whether you are a food service establishment selling prepared food. The definition covers food and beverages “prepared by” such an establishment. A deli or grill counter is a very different case from a listing of packaged goods, and platforms often onboard the two under different terms.

Can the platform charge more than 3% for transaction fees? Only where it can provide proof, on request, to both DCWP and to you, that the higher charge reflects a pass-through from a credit card company or internet-based payment system.

Can an app list my store without my agreement? DCWP states apps must have a written agreement with your restaurant to list it. If you were listed without signing anything, that is worth raising.

Am I charged for phone orders that do not convert? You should not be. DCWP states apps cannot charge for phone orders that do not end with a sale.

Can I charge more in the app than in the store? Platforms generally permit it, and our Uber Eats guide recommends 15 to 25 percent above shelf price, applied consistently across the menu. Where you sit in that range is a question about your tier. The commission is charged on the marked-up price as well, so a 25% markup recovers most of a basic plan’s 23% but only about two fifths of an enhanced plan’s 38%.

Is delivery worth it at all? It depends entirely on whether the orders are incremental. At the capped maximum on a basic plan you keep 77 cents of each dollar; on an enhanced plan, 62 cents. An order moved from the counter to the app is the same sale at a discount you are choosing to pay.

Key takeaways

• The cap is four numbers, not three. Per DCWP: 15% delivery, 3% transaction, 5% basic service and 20% enhanced service.
• The enhanced tier is the expensive one, and moving from basic to enhanced takes the capped maximum from 23% to 38% of the order.
• A 15-to-25% in-app markup is the right default, per our own Uber Eats guide, applied consistently — but the commission is charged on the marked-up price too, so the top of that range recovers most of a basic plan and only about two fifths of an enhanced one. Check the tier before you reprice.
• You are entitled to be offered a basic plan. DCWP states the enhanced fee can only be charged if the app offers a plan at the basic service fee amount.
• The transaction cap is rebuttable by the platform, but only with proof provided to both DCWP and to you (Council).
• There must be a written agreement to list your store, and phone orders that do not end in a sale are not chargeable.
• Sort your statement into the four buckets as a percentage of order value, not of payout. It is the only way to tell which tier you are on.
• The cap is written around prepared food from a food service establishment, so whether it protects a convenience store depends on how the listing is categorised.
• Check the agency page, not the press release. The 2021 announcement describes three buckets; the enforcing agency now publishes four.