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What Delivery Apps Really Cost a UK Restaurant: Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat, All In (2026)

Uber Eats publishes 30% for its riders and 13% if you deliver or the customer collects. Deliveroo charges its fee on the VAT-inclusive order, with VAT on top. What a £25 order leaves on each route, where going direct saves real money, and where the app costs about what doing it yourself would.

Alex Riesenkampff

10 October 2026 · Updated 15 October 2026 · 16 min read · Markdown

A £25 order delivered by an app's own riders at 30% commission leaves a UK restaurant about £5.88 once VAT, food, packaging and the fee are paid, before staff, rent and energy. Whether going direct is worth it depends on how the food reaches the customer. A collection order through your own site leaves £12.81, against £10.13 through the app's 13% pick-up. Delivering yourself, at three drops for every hour you pay the driver and with a £2 delivery fee, leaves about £7.41, only £1.53 more than the app's riders.

So the money in going direct is in collection orders and in regulars who would collect, rather than in replacing the app's riders with your own.

What each app publishes

Only Uber Eats publishes a UK rate card: 30% of the order for its riders, 13% when you deliver or the customer collects, and a £650 activation fee. Deliveroo's partner terms name one percentage for one case, and Just Eat does not publish UK rates, so anything else in circulation is a reported range.

For Just Eat, two ordering-software vendors with an interest in the answer report about 14% for orders the restaurant delivers and about 30% when Just Eat's couriers do. Which? put the range restaurants gave it at 15% to 35% back in 2021. Treat any such figure as the opening of a conversation with your account manager.

The fee buys something. Uber lists lead generation, order management, payment processing and round-the-clock support for you, your customers and its riders in every plan, and lists no separate card fee for app orders. The customer also pays the delivery and service fees on top of the food. Uber One members' orders cost you 33% instead of 30%, and Uber's page says membership benefits may apply to your restaurant at its discretion, so check your statement for how many orders went at the higher rate.

Where the percentage is applied

A 30% fee on a £25 order is £7.50, which is 36% of the £20.83 you keep after VAT, and £9.00 (43%) if you cannot reclaim the VAT on the fee. Deliveroo's terms are specific: "Our service fee is calculated as a percentage of GMV (inclusive of VAT) per order, plus VAT at the prevailing rate". Uber's UK terms say the retail price "will include VAT", and its pricing page says the percentages do not include VAT, so VAT comes on top there too.

If you are VAT-registered you can normally reclaim VAT on items bought for business use through your return. On the Flat Rate Scheme you cannot reclaim VAT on purchases, so the fee costs you a fifth more than the headline. Below the £90,000 registration threshold you charge no VAT on food and reclaim none on the fee, which the calculator below handles.

A £25 order, route by route

The same £25 order leaves £12.81 collected through your own site, £10.13 through the app's pick-up, about £7.41 delivered by your own driver, and £5.88 delivered by the app's riders. We assume hot food, which HMRC's catering notice treats as standard-rated when it meets its tests, so 20% VAT comes off first. Food is 30% of sales before VAT, and packaging £1.20, a low-end figure to replace with the cost of your own boxes and bags.

Three things decide where your own numbers land.

Drop density matters most. The £16.14 is an hour of a National Living Wage worker once employer National Insurance, pension and holiday are counted, the figure used in our guide to why a busy cafe is not profitable, and our guide to the true hourly cost of staff shows the working. The 55p is HMRC's approved mileage rate for a car from April 2026; a scooter's is 24p. Count drops across every hour you pay the driver, not only the peak. At five drops an hour the driver costs £4.88 a drop, and a direct delivered order leaves £9.57.

The delivery fee is the second lever. On Deliveroo's Marketplace+ the restaurant sets the fee customers pay for delivery, and Uber's terms describe the delivery charge on self-delivered orders as collected on the restaurant's behalf. Neither document states whether the commission is also charged on that fee, so ask before you set it. A delivery charge on hot food carries VAT like the food, so a £2 fee is £1.67 to a VAT-registered venue.

Discounts are the third. Deliveroo's terms say that where you fund an offer, "your service fee will be calculated on the discounted price paid by the Customer", and Uber's terms say the same. The fee shrinks a little while the food and packaging cost the same, so a 20% discount takes £5.88 down to £3.22. The promotion needs 83% more orders just to leave you where you were.

Charging more on the app

On Deliveroo a mark-up is allowed but policed: app prices 25% or more above your in-store menu lead, after repeated months, to the bottom of its rankings, and three months at 35% or more puts a site at risk of suspension. Deliveroo's partner terms say app prices "should be the same as the prices for menu items published in your dine-in or in-store menu". Its Value Programme scores each site monthly on service, app ratings and mark-up, measured on its top 20 items by sales. Once those limits apply, sites scored "Action" or "Improve" are "ranked below all other sites in our list position and in all other rankings on Deliveroo". Deliveroo's limitations table phases this in: a warning first, then lower placement and paused offers and adverts, with a site at "Action" for three months at risk of suspension. A site suspended for high mark-ups can ask to come back once the mark-up is under 35%.

The grades are published in a table on the same help page. No mark-up, or a discount, scores "Great", under 10% "Good", 10% to under 25% "Okay", 25% to under 35% "Improve" (or "Okay" if the gap is under £1.75) and 35% or more "Action". Under the grade table, Great and Good also need an app rating of at least 4.5 and service figures above the Improve thresholds, and only they get Deliveroo's value badges, better placement in its value and offers carousels, and offers Deliveroo pays for.

Uber's UK terms leave the listed price to you, but they name pricing among the things that decide where you rank. Check Just Eat's terms for your own contract.

The arithmetic is simple. On a 30% app, every 10% you add to a £25 basket leaves about £1.33 more, so a 10% mark-up lifts £5.88 to £7.22 and keeps you at "Okay" on Deliveroo, while 20% gets you £8.55. Against a direct order delivered by your own driver (£7.41), the gap closes at a mark-up of about 12%, inside Deliveroo's Okay band. Against a direct collection order it would take about 52%, which no grade tolerates.

Guests notice. Deliveroo says one in three of its customers told it they did not go ahead with an order once they spotted a mark-up. A modest uplift on the dishes that travel worst, said plainly on your own menu, is easier to defend than a blanket 20%.

When the app earns its fee

The apps pay for themselves on orders that would not otherwise have reached you, and the one large study finds the overall gain for fast-food chains four times that for independents. Li and Wang's study in Management Science (October 2024), using US data, found that "restaurants overall benefit from on-demand delivery platforms", that "the overall positive effect on fast-food chains is four times as large as that on independent restaurants", and that "delivery platforms substitute independent restaurants’ but complement chain restaurants’ own takeout sales". Independents gained mainly through more dine-in visits. A Stanford honors thesis written in 2020, not peer reviewed, estimated that 30 to 50 cents of every dollar spent through the apps is new business.

Neither study measures what a UK independent keeps after commission. What they suggest is that the app is worth paying for when it brings strangers, and expensive when it carries a regular who would have rung you or walked in.

For some restaurants the app is most of the business. George Kontaskos, of the Olive Grove restaurant in Cambridge, told Which? in June 2021: "Removing ourselves from Deliveroo would mean becoming invisible to online orders. More than 60% of our sales come through the app." Leaving is a bigger decision there than trimming one channel.

The other direction happens too. Tortilla, a UK chain, ended its Deliveroo partnership in February 2024, saying delivery commission charges had "challenged margin performance", even though its three delivery partners had helped sales and brand awareness. A chain with a finance team has more room to move than a single cafe.

If you have not joined yet

For a new venue the app is mostly a way to be found, so join for the hours your kitchen has room and leave discounts off until you know what an order leaves you. Uber's activation fee of up to £650, which covers a tablet, printer, menu set-up and photography and is lower if you opt out of some of them, takes as many as 111 orders at £5.88 each to cover. Deliveroo charges new partners a one-off joining fee whichever equipment option they choose, so the cost of trying is not zero.

Three things are worth deciding before the first order arrives. First, which dishes travel: anything that goes soggy in 20 minutes earns you a bad rating, and on Deliveroo an app rating under 4.5 rules out the two best Value Scores. Second, your opening hours on the app: list only the hours when the kitchen can take an extra ticket without slowing the dining room. Third, your prices: if you plan a mark-up, decide it before launch and keep it inside the band Deliveroo grades as Okay or better.

Treat the first three months as a test. If most app orders come from people who have never eaten with you, the fee is buying customers. If your regulars start ordering through the app instead of ringing you, it is time to give them a reason to come direct; what a regular is worth is covered in the economics of the second visit.

When going direct pays

A collection order moved from the app to your own site is worth about £2.68 more, a delivery order moved to your own driver about £1.53, and a customer who switches from app delivery to collecting from you £6.93. Those are the numbers to divide your ordering tool's monthly price by. Next Order lists its till software and ordering bundle from £79 a month on an annual plan, and Flipdish from £119, both before VAT; both include till software, so compare them with what you pay for yours today.

There is a middle path for delivery. Uber Direct delivers orders taken on your own site for a fee per delivery, and Deliveroo Express does the same with Deliveroo's riders; neither publishes a UK price, so ask both for a quote before hiring a driver.

Only orders you would otherwise have lost to the app count, so these are floors. You also cannot take the customer list with you. Deliveroo's terms say you "must not access or use any Order Info for any purpose other than the fulfilment" of the order, and Uber's terms limit the personal data it shares to providing the items. A mailing list has to be built on your own channel, with the customer's consent.

How your Google profile and website work as the front door for direct orders is covered in that guide, and where new guests come from in the first place is in where diners find you.

What to do first

Keep the app for strangers and deliveries, and move collection orders and regulars to your own channel first, because that is where the saving is largest, about £2.68 an order and £6.93 when a delivery customer starts collecting. Running your own drivers to escape the 30% only pays where drops are close together, and it adds a hiring and safety job you do not have today.

Change course if your kitchen cannot keep up with app orders and dine-in guests at the same time; turning the app off for the busiest hour protects the people in the room. If you run your own drivers, check that their insurance covers delivery work, and avoid paying by the drop in a way that rewards speed over safety. Prime cost is the right yardstick for whether delivery has moved your costs the wrong way. The same contribution arithmetic decides what an empty table is worth defending, which is where our guide to no-show fees and deposits starts.