Third-party delivery commissions are rising. If you run a restaurant, you already know this. But how well do you understand the numbers underneath these rising prices? And do your customers understand exactly why they’re paying such inflated prices for your food every time they order with a third-party delivery service like DoorDash, Grubhub, or Uber Eats?
A recent proposal from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) suggests there may be a lot we don’t know about these rising delivery fees. The FTC is the agency responsible for protecting consumers from abusive practices by commercial entities. In April, the FTC began investigating “Unfair and Deceptive Fee Practices in Online Food and Grocery Delivery Services.”
The goal of this investigation is to determine whether or not consumers are paying hidden food-delivery fees, and if so, how new food delivery app regulations might improve transparency. We are currently in the earliest stages of the rulemaking process. Turning a proposal into a new set of food delivery app regulations can take months or years, if it happens at all.
With that in mind, we wanted to understand:
But first, let’s take a closer look at the delivery market and the issue of third-party delivery fees.
Online delivery has become a huge part of the restaurant business. A recent Toast survey of 850 adults offers some eye-opening stats:
Off-premises dining is a huge chunk of our business today, and it’s only growing. But that’s not all that’s growing. So are delivery fees. Some of the major third-party services may be charging you commission fees that are as much as 15 to 30% of the total order value for every delivery.
Not only are these fees crushing margins, but they may also be scaring consumers away. According to Toast, 40% of survey respondents say the most frustrating thing about third-party delivery apps is the significant upcharge on regular menu prices.
These fees aren’t just rising. They’re also getting harder to understand. Third-party delivery services use a pretty complicated formula to calculate these fees.
This formula usually includes “service fees” and “delivery fees,” both of which can vary based on factors like:
Not only is the math behind all of this pretty complicated, but your customers don’t see any of these numbers until they get to checkout. As this article from CNBC points out, your online customer might fill a shopping cart with $15 worth of menu items. They won’t see the additional $10 in service and delivery fees until they’re checking out.
Suddenly, your customers are paying $25 for $15 worth of food.
Are these pricing strategies deceptive? And should third-party delivery services be required to display these fees with more clarity and transparency?
These are the questions that the FTC is attempting to answer right now.
On April 15, 2026, the FTC issued something called an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR). This is the first step in the rulemaking process. The goal of this ANPR is “to address certain unfair or deceptive acts or practices relating to fees and charges for food and grocery items ordered through online delivery platforms.”
In an FTC request for public input on the proposal, Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, explains, “The Commission’s enforcement track record suggests that consumers continue to face a suite of fees that prevent them from making informed comparisons.”
In other words, delivery services have a proven history of engaging in deceptive pricing, and the FTC has taken legal action to punish these businesses in the past. The main purpose of the new rule proposal is to find out if more rules are needed to “prevent persons, entities, and organizations from engaging in such unfair or deceptive acts or practices.”
The April 15 proposal initiated a one-month comment period, where interested parties were invited to submit comment letters with data, evidence, analysis, and arguments related to hidden food-delivery fees.
In their request for public comments, the FTC shared the following prompt:
Consider the food delivery platforms and apps you use. Do they clearly display the total price of the items you order? Do they clearly disclose what fees, charges, or other costs you’ll have to pay, and tell you when they use variable or personalized pricing? Do they tell you if prices are higher online than they are in the store? Let us know.
The comment period closed on May 18, 2026. The FTC is currently reviewing comments for consideration and inclusion in a final set of rules. (If you missed the first comment deadline, don’t worry. You’ll get another chance to submit feedback once an initial rule proposal is published.)
To be clear, even the most ambitious set of rules is unlikely to have any direct impact on the cost of third-party delivery commissions. The FTC is not proposing to place limits on what delivery services can charge. Instead, the goal is to eliminate hidden food-delivery fees. The most robust outcome would be designed to ensure that consumers know exactly what they’re paying for and your customers know all their options.
Consumer Reports submitted a comment letter, recommending new transparency requirements for food delivery apps. Here’s a quick look at what Consumer Reports hopes to see included in the new set of rules.
Of course, these are just the recommendations of one group. We’ll have to wait to find out if any of these ideas are included in the final set of rules. But it does seem like some combination of these rules would help improve the delivery landscape for consumers and restaurant operators.
Here are a few ways we see these rules helping your restaurant.
The last of these benefits might be the most important. That’s because no matter how you slice it, your menu items cost a lot more when customers buy them through third-party delivery services. By requiring these services to display and itemize any added charges upfront, the new rules would help restaurants explain the higher prices to their customers.
The FTC has a specific procedure for turning a rule proposal into a new set of rules:
There is no specific timeline for these steps just yet, but rulemaking can take months or years to complete. Legal challenges during the judicial review stage can make the process take even longer.
Obviously, we have no way of knowing what the final rules will look like nor how impactful they will actually be. And once again, no matter how they turn out, the new rules won’t directly lower third-party delivery commissions.
So we wouldn’t necessarily recommend a wait-and-see approach with the new set of rules. It’s really about taking action now. Here are a few ways you can do that:
We are hopeful that a new set of rules would help to create a more transparent and competitive delivery landscape — one where consumers feel they have more choices, and where restaurants have more control over their delivery operations and profit margins.
In the meantime, it’s really up to you as a business owner to take the initiative. There are all kinds of restaurant tech solutions that can help you take more control and provide more value to your customers. But the right set of solutions is different for every restaurant.
Schedule your free, personalized consultation with one of our in-house restaurant tech pros and we’ll work together to figure out exactly what you need.