Several U.S. cities passed laws capping what DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub can charge restaurants — most starting as pandemic-era emergency measures that some cities later made permanent. The catch: coverage varies a lot by city, and at least one major cap situation changed significantly in the last year. Here's where things actually stand.
As of 2026, several major cities have made their delivery commission caps permanent rather than letting them expire with pandemic-era emergency orders:
In these cities, a restaurant's marketplace commission is legally limited regardless of which plan tier the platform tries to sell — though platforms have generally responded by shifting cost onto consumer-facing fees rather than absorbing it themselves.
New York implemented a 15% delivery cap and 5% cap on other fees back in 2020, later making it permanent — but that's no longer the full picture. DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub sued the city over the caps, and a 2025 settlement changed the structure significantly. Under the new arrangement, platforms can charge additional fees on top of the base delivery commission, with the effective total reportedly able to reach as high as 43% of the order value in some cases — even though the headline 15% delivery-fee line item technically still exists.
Most U.S. cities have no commission cap at all, meaning DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub can — and typically do — charge their standard 15–30% tiered commission with no regulatory ceiling. If a restaurant isn't in one of the cities above, this is almost certainly the case.
A legal cap limits what a marketplace app can charge — it doesn't eliminate the commission entirely, and as New York's situation shows, cap structures can shift over time in ways that don't always favor restaurants. A direct ordering channel isn't just a workaround for uncapped cities; it's a way to avoid the commission question altogether, regardless of what a given city's current cap happens to allow.