Uber Eats commission: what it actually costs Australian venues

You open the Uber Eats dashboard on a Monday morning to reconcile the week's takings. The app shows $9,400 in gross delivery sales. The payout that actually lands in your account is closer to $6,600. Somewhere between the customer's card and your bank account, close to $2,800 disappeared — and if you've never sat down and worked out exactly where it went, you're not alone.

That gap is commission. It's the price of being listed on a platform that, for a lot of venues, now controls most of the customers who order delivery in the first place. And as of late 2025, there are fewer of those platforms than there used to be.

Menulog is gone, and that changes the maths

Menulog shut down its Australian operations on 26 November 2025, after roughly two decades in the market. Existing customers, couriers and restaurant partners were redirected to Uber Eats under a commercial agreement between the two companies.

Before it closed, Menulog held around 24% of the Australian delivery market, behind Uber Eats' 54% and ahead of DoorDash's 15% — the three platforms together controlled more than 90% of the country's food delivery spend. With Menulog gone, that share doesn't vanish. It flows to the two platforms left standing.

Academics writing in The Conversation flagged the obvious risk at the time: platforms that spent years subsidising prices and commission to win market share have far less reason to keep doing that once the competition thins out. Fewer platforms bidding for your listing means less pressure on any of them to keep commission low.

For a venue, that's the context worth understanding before you look at your own numbers. You're not negotiating with three options anymore. You're negotiating with two.

What Uber Eats and DoorDash actually take

Both platforms publish tiered commission structures, and the tier you're on is usually a trade-off between the cut you pay and the visibility or marketing you get in return.

DoorDash Australia's published tiers:

• Basic — 15% commission on delivery orders, 6% on pickup
• Plus — 25% on delivery orders
• Premier — 30% on delivery, 6% on pickup, with automatic ad placement and a "20-order guarantee" bundled in
• New partners get a 30-day trial at 0% commission before any of the above kicks in

Uber Eats' Australian plans follow a similar shape, though the exact percentages are less consistently published than DoorDash's — most reporting puts them somewhere in this range:

• Lite — around 20% on delivery, 7% on pickup
• Plus — around 25%, rising to 30% on orders placed by Uber One members
• Premium — around 30% on delivery, 7% on pickup
• Self-delivery (you supply your own driver, Uber just handles the listing and ordering) — meaningfully lower, around 16%

The pattern across both: the more of the platform's marketing and logistics machinery you use, the higher the percentage you hand back. There's no version of either plan that gets you below 15%, and the plans most venues actually land on — because they include ad placement, or because Uber One membership pushes a chunk of orders into the top tier automatically — sit closer to 25-30%.

Run the numbers on a real month

Take a venue doing $40,000 a month in delivery sales through Uber Eats or DoorDash's marketplace, on the top 30% tier. That's $12,000 a month — roughly $144,000 a year — gone before you've paid for a single ingredient, wage, or piece of packaging.

Smaller scale, same shape: a $30 order at 25% commission hands the platform $7.50. Whatever's left has to cover food cost, the person who cooked it, the person who packed it, the box it went out in, and tax. On a lot of menus, that doesn't leave much room to move.

None of this means delivery apps are bad business. A lot of venues genuinely can't reach the customers a marketplace app reaches on its own — new suburb, no marketing budget, a slow Tuesday that needs filling. The point isn't "stop using them." It's knowing exactly what the arrangement costs before you decide how much of your business should run through it.

Where the money is meant to go

To Uber's credit, they're upfront about part of the answer. Uber's own newsroom states that more than half of the remaining commission is reinvested into the marketplace through advertising and marketing, with the rest covering card transaction costs, technology, and operating costs.

That's a fair counterpoint, and worth taking at face value — a chunk of that 30% is genuinely buying you placement in front of people who weren't going to find you otherwise. The question for any individual venue isn't whether that value is real. It's whether you're still paying for it on the hundredth order from a regular who already knows your name.

If Uber Eats' own answer to Uber Eats' fees is a commission-free ordering page, that tells you what the 30% was really buying: access, not service.

Here's the detail that makes the point better than we could: Uber Eats itself offers Webshop, a commission-free, Uber-branded ordering page that still runs on Uber's own delivery fleet. Uber positions it explicitly as a way for restaurants to "keep more of what they earn" and "build repeat business with access to customer data." If the platform that charges up to 30% for a listing also sells a version with none of that fee attached, the fee was never really about the delivery. It was about being found.

The other lever: menu markup

Commission isn't the only place the platforms can pick up margin. Australia's consumer watchdog CHOICE investigated pricing on Uber Eats, DoorDash and Milkrun in 2025 — worth flagging clearly, this was a study of grocery delivery, not restaurant meals, but it's the same two platforms and the pattern is relevant. CHOICE found customers paid roughly 11% more on average buying groceries through the apps than in-store, with the worst example — a four-pack of Coles ice-cream — running as much as 42% higher through the apps than buying it off the shelf. DoorDash discloses to customers that item prices may run higher than in-store; CHOICE found Uber Eats and Milkrun were less upfront about it.

That's not proof restaurant menus are marked up by the same margin inside the app — nobody's published that number for Australia, and we're not going to invent one. But it does establish something real: these two platforms have a documented, watchdog-confirmed pattern of charging more through the app than in the real world, on the same Australian market you're selling into. Worth knowing before you assume the price a customer sees on your listing is the exact price you set.

What to ignore

A few pieces of advice that circulate around this topic and don't hold up:

• "Just raise your delivery-menu prices to cover the commission." It helps, but it doesn't fix the structural problem — you're still handing a third of every dollar to the platform, and now your app menu looks worse value than your dine-in menu, which erodes trust with regulars who order both ways.
• "Drop the apps entirely." For most venues that's throwing away real incremental customers — the stranger three suburbs over who'd never have found you otherwise. The apps are genuinely good at that job.
• "Do your own delivery to dodge commission." Self-delivery tiers do cut the percentage, but you're trading commission for staffing, insurance, and vehicle costs — a real trade-off, not a free win, and one that only makes sense at real volume.

If you want the labour side of this story rather than the commission side, we covered Uber Eats' driver pay rise and what it's doing to delivery margins separately — a related but different mechanism squeezing the same order.

The honest pitch

Delivery apps aren't the villain here. Being completely dependent on one — or on a duopoly with no real reason to keep prices down — is the actual risk. Keep the marketplace listing for the stranger ordering from you for the first time. Build somewhere that isn't renting you access to your own regulars for every order after.

That's the plain argument for having a real website with your own booking and enquiry form built in — one that takes a table booking, a catering enquiry, or a customer question directly, with no marketplace commission sitting between you and the person asking. You already own that relationship the moment someone finds your site instead of your listing; a website is just what lets you keep it. FastPage builds that site for Australian cafes, restaurants and bars in minutes, not months. If you're ready to stop paying access fees for customers who already know your name, get started free.