How Much to Mark Up Menu Prices on Delivery Apps: The Math, the Rules and What Restaurants Charge

What the apps charge

On their standard U.S. plans, DoorDash and Uber Eats include card processing in the marketplace commission; in some fee-capped cities Uber lists processing separately (its New York City Lite package is 15% delivery, 5% pickup and a 3% card-processing fee), and Grubhub's pricing page says its fees do not include payment processing. The base matters for markup math. DoorDash charges its commission on the pre-tax subtotal of the items, after promotions you fund; Uber Eats on the retail price of all items in the order; Grubhub does not publish its base. On DoorDash and Uber Eats, then, a higher app price pays a higher commission too.

The price that holds a dish's contribution

The markup is bigger than the commission because the commission is charged on the marked-up price. At 25%, covering the commission alone takes 1 ÷ 0.75 − 1 = 33.3% more; at 30% it takes 42.9%; packaging adds the rest. The same arithmetic at pickup rates is small: 6.4% at a 6% commission and 7.5% at 7%, before packaging. The delivery margin calculator runs it for your own dish.

Partial markups: what each one keeps

The choice need not be the same for every dish. Dishes with heavy packaging or thin contributions need more of the holding price; a few well-known items can stay close to the in-house price if the app rewards consistent pricing. Whatever you choose, write the rule down — for example, holding price rounded down to the nearest 49 or 99 cents — so the app menu is not repriced by memory. For how a price change lands with guests, see raising menu prices.

What the apps say about charging more in the app

• —DoorDash tells merchants "your in-store prices don't need to match your DoorDash menu prices" and recommends matching them "as closely as possible, but this isn't required." Its Marketplace Addendum lets it take into account "detrimental price markups and/or customer complaints about price markups" when deciding a merchant's prominence, program participation and availability on the platform, and the 6% pickup rate requires pickup prices that match in-store prices.
• —Uber Eats' merchant terms say the merchant "in its sole discretion, sets the price of Items," but the same terms also say Uber displays the merchant's in-store price by default, may update the app price to match it, may weigh prices in prominence, may suspend or remove a merchant that fails to meet its pricing section, and bar pricing an item higher than on "any Uber Competitor." The two sets of clauses sit side by side; check your own order form and ask how they are applied. The 7% pickup fee requires validated in-store pricing.
• —Grubhub supports "distinct prices for each order fulfillment type," and its public merchant terms contain no price-parity clause; your signed agreement may still have one.

Where the law protects your pricing

Some cities cap what apps can charge and bar them from controlling your prices. San Francisco, Seattle and Portland cap platform fees at 15% of the menu price (Portland also caps takeout at 4% and lets a platform pass through the card processor's actual fee), and each prohibits platforms from restricting the prices a restaurant charges; Seattle's code says a platform "shall not impose, by agreement or other means, any restrictions on the prices that a restaurant may charge for food and/or beverages" (Seattle Municipal Code 7.30). All three let a platform charge more for extra services if it offers a compliant 15% delivery option — San Francisco since January 31, 2023 — and San Francisco's rules exclude formula-retail chains. New York City has its own caps; see the NYC delivery app fee caps. Chicago's cap expired on October 31, 2021, and several other pandemic-era caps were temporary.

No federal rule tells a restaurant to disclose that app prices are higher. The FTC's rule on unfair or deceptive fees covers only live-event tickets and short-term lodging. In April 2026 the FTC asked for public comment on a possible food-delivery rule, including whether platforms disclose that item prices differ from in-store prices; comments closed May 18, 2026, and no proposed rule had followed by September 30. Uber Eats already tells customers that app prices "may differ from prices and offers at the merchant."

What restaurants actually charge

The most careful measurement found is an economics paper its author reports as accepted at the Journal of Political Economy (Sullivan, manuscript of March 30, 2026). Using U.S. receipt data from 2019 to 2021, it estimates platform prices about 21% above direct-order prices where commissions were uncapped at 30%, and about 9% where a 15% cap applied; a December 2022 sample of restaurant and platform websites puts the gap at 13% without caps and 7% with them. Each percentage point of commission raised online prices by about 0.69% in its estimates. The data exclude the six largest chains and items with fewer than 100 orders in each channel, so read them as what restaurants chose, not a rule. At a 30% commission, full recovery before packaging takes a 42.9% markup; a 21% average is about half of that, which on our reading means restaurants recovered only part of the commission on average — a conclusion the paper does not draw itself.

DoorDash and Uber Eats also publish internal study and survey figures on how diners react to markups; neither publishes the method behind them, so they are not used here.

Marji keeps each dish's plate cost current from your supplier invoices — the number the markup math starts from. It does not connect to delivery apps or set their prices; you decide and enter app prices yourself.