A $50 delivery order and the restaurant nets $34. That's not a hypothetical — it's the median outcome once a third-party platform's commission, marketing fee, and card-processing charge all come off the top. For years, restaurant owners have grumbled about the gap between what a customer pays and what actually lands in the bank account. In 2026, two separate regulatory moves are forcing that gap into the open: a federal proposal that could require delivery apps to show the real price before checkout, and a New York City law that just let platforms charge restaurants nearly double what they could a year ago.
Neither change is small print. Both directly affect how much revenue a delivery order actually generates and how a restaurant should be recording it.
The FTC Is Looking at Food Delivery Pricing — But It's Not Final Yet
On April 16, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) on "unfair or deceptive fees" in online food and grocery delivery. It's worth being precise about what this is and isn't: it is not a final rule, and there's no compliance deadline yet. It's the FTC formally asking the public — including restaurant owners and delivery platforms — to weigh in before it drafts an actual rule. Comments were due by May 18, 2026.
That said, the direction is clear, and it follows a pattern. In May 2025, the FTC's junk fees rule took effect for live-event tickets and short-term lodging, requiring "all-in" pricing that shows the total cost upfront instead of tacking on fees at checkout. The food-delivery ANPRM signals the agency wants to extend that same logic to your $18 burrito that somehow becomes $30 by the time you hit "place order."
The ANPRM asks pointed questions about:
- Total price transparency — whether platforms must show the full price, including delivery and service fees, before a customer commits to an order
- Fee characterization — whether a charge is disclosed accurately as mandatory vs. optional, and whether its purpose (delivery, service, "small order," etc.) is stated truthfully
- Price parity — whether the same menu item costs more on the app than in-store, and whether that markup is disclosed
- Restriction disclosures — whether promotions and discounts come with conditions that aren't shown until checkout
- Unauthorized fees — charges for services the customer or restaurant never actually agreed to
Notably, the ANPRM doesn't only look at DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub. It also asks about restaurants and grocers running their own delivery operations — so a restaurant with an in-house delivery app or a "we deliver too" checkout flow could eventually fall under the same disclosure requirements, not just the aggregators.
What to do now: nothing is required yet, but this is worth tracking. If you run any direct-to-consumer delivery or online ordering, keep your fee disclosures — delivery charges, service fees, minimum order surcharges — clearly itemized rather than bundled into a single "fees" line. That habit will serve you regardless of how the final rule lands, and it also happens to reduce customer complaints and chargebacks today.
NYC Just Nearly Doubled the Fee Cap Platforms Can Charge Restaurants
While the FTC rule is still hypothetical, New York City's change is already in effect and already showing up in restaurant bank deposits.
Back in 2020, in the depths of the pandemic, NYC capped what third-party delivery platforms could charge restaurants at 23% of the order total — a response to complaints that platforms were taking an outsized cut from businesses that had no real alternative for delivery during lockdowns. Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats sued, arguing the cap was an unconstitutional price control. Rather than litigate it out, the city and the platforms reached a settlement in April 2025: the platforms would drop their lawsuits, and the City Council would raise the cap.
The Council delivered. The new law allows platforms to charge restaurants up to 43% in total fees — nearly double the old ceiling — broken into four capped categories:
| Fee category | Cap |
|---|---|
| Core delivery service | 15% |
| Basic marketing / platform visibility | 5% |
| Credit card processing | 3% |
| "Enhanced services" (expanded delivery radius, premium promotion, etc.) | 20% |
The law took effect in stages, with platforms required to notify their NYC restaurant partners of new service plans and fee structures by June 30, 2026. If you operate a restaurant in NYC and haven't reviewed the new fee schedule your delivery platform sent you, that's worth doing this week — the "enhanced services" tier in particular is opt-in in name only if the default plan a restaurant gets bumped into includes it.
New York isn't uniquely exposed here, either. It's simply the highest-profile example of a broader trend: pandemic-era delivery fee caps in cities across the country are expiring, being challenged in court, or getting rolled back through settlements like this one. If your city imposed a delivery fee cap in 2020–2021, check whether it's still in force — several have quietly sunset.
What This Actually Costs — And How to Track It
The math matters more than the headline percentage. A jump from 23% to a potential 43% doesn't mean every order now costs a restaurant 43% — it means the ceiling moved, and platforms have more room to bundle "enhanced" tiers into standard plans. Restaurants that don't audit which tier they're on can end up paying for delivery radius expansion or promotional placement they never asked for.
A few numbers to sanity-check against your own statements:
- On a $50 order at the low end (18% total: 15% delivery + 3% processing), the restaurant nets roughly $41.
- At the high end (43%, full enhanced-services tier), that same $50 order nets roughly $28.50.
- That's a $12.50 swing on a single order purely based on which fee tier the restaurant is enrolled in — before food cost, labor, or anything else.
Multiply that across a few hundred delivery orders a month and the difference between "reviewed our tier" and "didn't" is a material chunk of margin.
Recording delivery fees correctly
The single 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 "sales of $28.50" — it's $50 of gross revenue minus $21.50 of expense. Collapsing the two into one number understates both your top-line sales and your delivery costs, which distorts everything downstream: menu pricing decisions, margin analysis, and your tax return (gross receipts figures matter for more than one filing threshold).
The cleaner structure:
- Gross delivery sales — the full menu price the customer paid, recorded as revenue
- Delivery platform commission — the delivery + marketing + enhanced-services percentage, recorded as a commission/fees expense
- Card processing fee — the 3% processing cut, recorded separately as a merchant/payment-processing expense (it behaves differently at tax time and for margin analysis than a marketing commission does)
- Promotions or discounts — if the platform ran a promo funded by the restaurant, that's a separate contra-revenue or marketing-expense line, not folded into the commission
Reconciling this by hand from a lump-sum weekly deposit is exactly the kind of task that turns into a mess by year-end. 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 rather than trusting the deposit total alone.
This is also a good moment to separate delivery revenue and delivery costs into their own accounts in your chart of accounts, distinct from dine-in or pickup. When fee structures change — as they just did in NYC, and as they may again once the FTC rule finalizes — having that separation means you can immediately see the margin impact instead of discovering it three months later when overall profitability looks off and you can't tell why.
Should You Push Customers Toward Direct Ordering?
The 43% ceiling has revived a conversation restaurants have been having since delivery apps first took off: is it cheaper to just take orders yourself? A direct order through your own website or a QR code at 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 discovery and order volume a standalone restaurant website usually can't match on its own. But it does mean the math is worth running per order type, not just once a year. If a meaningful share of your delivery volume comes from repeat customers who already know your restaurant, a modest incentive to order direct — even a small discount that's still cheaper than the 43% cap — can move real margin back onto your books. Track direct and third-party delivery orders as separate revenue streams so you can actually see whether the shift is working, rather than guessing from a blended total.
Other Cities Are Watching
NYC's settlement-driven cap increase didn't happen in a vacuum, and it won't be the last. Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco each imposed their own pandemic-era delivery fee caps, and several are facing similar legal pressure from platforms arguing the caps can't stand indefinitely. If your business operates delivery in a city with an existing fee cap, it's worth checking whether that cap is being challenged, sunsetting on its own terms, or scheduled for a legislative review — the NYC pattern (litigation → settlement → a higher negotiated cap) is becoming the template other cities are likely to follow rather than an isolated case.
Keep Your Delivery Numbers Straight from the Start
Whether you're watching for the FTC's final rule or adjusting to a new fee tier in New York, the underlying discipline is the same: record gross sales and platform fees as separate line items, reconcile every payout against an itemized report, and revisit your fee tier whenever a platform changes its terms. Beancount.io gives you plain-text accounting that makes this kind of line-item tracking transparent and auditable — no black-box software hiding which delivery order actually made you money. Get started for free and see how developers and finance-minded business owners are tracking their real margins, not just their bank balance.