What delivery commission actually costs a Florida restaurant, counted by Zayos.
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
Florida restaurants pay 15% to 30% base delivery commission on the published marketplace rate cards, and 25% to 35% blended once promotions, sponsored placement and processing stack on top. At a $32 ticket, a 25% blended take costs $8 per order. Zayos charges the restaurant nothing per order.
60 seconds. No card. It prices your own last month.
What is the difference between base and blended commission?
Almost every argument about delivery commission is really two people quoting two different numbers. Base commission is the percentage printed on the rate card, the one a sales rep repeats on the phone. Across DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub that band is roughly 15% to 30%, set by which partnership tier you sit on. Blended commission is what actually left your bank account divided by what you sold. For most independents that lands between 25% and 35%.
Base commission is the number on the rate card, 15% to 30% by tier. Blended commission is the number in your bank statement, 25% to 35% for most independents, and the ten point gap between them is the part nobody quotes.
The gap is not a conspiracy, it is line items. Card processing, sponsored placement, restaurant funded promotions, pickup commission on collected orders, and refunds and error charges deducted from your payout. Each one is small enough to ignore on a single order and large enough to matter across a season. When a vendor, a competitor or this page quotes you a commission number, ask which one it is. We label ours every time.
What is actually in the commission stack?
Six lines, across the three apps a Florida independent typically runs at once. Figures are the published merchant rate structures and are stated as approximate because tiers and regional terms change. Confirm your own rates in your merchant portal agreement.
| Line item | DoorDash | Uber Eats | Grubhub | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base delivery commission | ~15% Basic, ~25% Plus, ~30% Premier | ~20% Lite, ~25% Plus, ~30% Premium | ~15% / ~20% / ~25% marketing commission by tier | The headline number. Higher tiers buy placement and a wider delivery radius. |
| Pickup or delivery add on | ~6% flat pickup commission, all plans | ~7% pickup, all plans | ~10% delivery commission on Grubhub delivered orders | Charged on orders where the app provides no driver, or in addition to the marketing tier. |
| Card processing | Folded into the commission model | Folded into the commission model | 3.05% plus $0.30 per order, all plans | Grubhub bills it separately. The others bury it, which makes their headline look lower. |
| Sponsored placement | Optional, billed on attributed sales or clicks | Optional, billed on attributed sales or clicks | Optional promotional spend | Voluntary in theory. In a crowded corridor it is the price of being visible at all. |
| Funded promotions | Restaurant funds part or all of the offer | Restaurant funds part or all of the offer | Restaurant funds part or all of the offer | Free delivery and percent off promos come out of your side of the ticket, not theirs. |
| Refunds and order errors | Deducted from payout, dispute window applies | Deducted from payout, dispute window applies | Deducted from payout, dispute window applies | Read your own agreement for the window. This line spikes after a storm closure. |
| Zayos direct orders | No commission. The restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips. The diner pays a flat service fee at checkout: $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine in, 10% catering. | $499 to $699 per location per month, month to month, no setup fee. | ||
Deeper per app breakdowns, with the tier tables and worked single order examples, are on DoorDash commission, Uber Eats commission and Grubhub commission.
What does that cost one Florida location in dollars?
Modeled at a $32 average online ticket and a 25% blended take, the low end of the blended band. Every cell below is arithmetic on those two inputs, so you can substitute your own ticket and rate and redo it on a napkin.
| Volume | Gross online sales | Commission at 25% blended | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 orders a month | $16,000 | $4,000 a month | $48,000 a year |
| 1,500 orders a month | $48,000 | $12,000 a month | $144,000 a year |
| 3,000 orders a month | $96,000 | $24,000 a month | $288,000 a year |
At 3,000 to 12,000 orders a month, an independent location gives up somewhere between $48,000 and $300,000 or more per location per year to marketplace commission. That is the modeled range, and the order volume is the basis it depends on. It is wider than the table above because it spans different average tickets, tier rates and channel mixes rather than one fixed pair of inputs.
The only customer figure we publish is the real one: Naya Grill, live on Zayos in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, keeps $48,000 or more a year that used to leave as commission. Everything else on this page is arithmetic you can check. Run your own inputs in the savings calculator, or read the Florida commission benchmark and the national commission statistics.
Why does the Florida commission bill have a different shape?
The bill concentrates into the months that fund your year
Commission is a percentage, so its dollar cost follows volume, and Florida volume is not spread evenly. South Florida, from Palm Beach through Broward and Miami-Dade, loads November to April on snowbird and visitor traffic and thins out in August. Central Florida runs the opposite shape on summer and holiday theme park families. The Gulf coast and the Panhandle fill from Memorial Day to Labor Day. If a location books 60% of its annual online volume in a six month season, it also pays 60% of its annual commission in those six months, out of exactly the cash that is supposed to carry the slow half of the year.
In a seasonal market, percentage commission takes the most money in the months a restaurant is trying to bank, and the least in the months it does not need the relief.
Two tax paths land on one Florida return
Since July 1, 2021, Florida requires marketplace providers to collect and remit sales tax on the sales they facilitate. On an app order, the marketplace generally handles the tax. On a direct order taken on your own site, you are the seller and you remit it yourself, at the 6% state rate plus the county discretionary sales surtax where the sale happens, on a return due the first of the following month and late after the 20th. One restaurant, two paths, one filing. That reconciliation is where mistakes live, and it is a reason to have the direct side set money aside automatically rather than by memory. Zayos runs DAVO, which moves the tax out daily and files it. Confirm your own treatment with your accountant, because the answer depends on how each charge is stated on the receipt.
A storm closure turns into deductions
Atlantic hurricane season runs June 1 through November 30. Marketplace agreements generally deduct customer refunds and order error charges from restaurant payouts, subject to a dispute window, so a closure that catches orders in flight does not just cost you the sales. It costs you the refunds, and it costs you the review. Practise the pause. Know how long you have to dispute a charge on each app, and keep a channel you control so you can tell your own customers you are closed instead of hoping three apps do it for you.
Tourist covers and local covers deserve different rates
In a corridor like Las Olas, Ocean Drive, or the beach towns up A1A, a large share of covers are visitors who will never search your name again. Paying to reach them is defensible. In Hialeah, Kissimmee, Coral Springs or Wilton Manors, the same rate is being charged on people who already know exactly where they are ordering from. Same percentage, completely different value.
Is delivery commission ever worth paying?
Yes, and a page that says otherwise is selling you something. Marketplace apps do a job no ordering platform does: they put an unknown restaurant in front of a hungry stranger. For a location that opened four months ago, for a cuisine nobody in the neighbourhood has tried, and for a tourist market where a big share of demand arrives by plane, that reach is worth real money. There is no version of a Florida beach corridor where the honest advice is to delete the apps.
Commission is a finder fee. It is worth paying on a diner you have not met, and it is waste on the regular who already knows your name.
The mistake is not being on the apps. The mistake is having no other channel, so a customer they found once costs you 25% to 35% every time they come back for the next three years. The fix is to keep the marketplaces doing what they are good at and stop renting your regulars.
How do you cut the commission without losing the reach?
Four steps, in order, and none of them require cancelling anything. First, put a real ordering page on your own domain, not a link that opens a marketplace. Second, put the insert in the bag: every marketplace delivery is a paid introduction, and a card offering the same food for less on your own site converts a rented customer into an owned one. Third, capture the name, phone and email on the direct order so the second visit costs you nothing. Fourth, keep the apps running for strangers.
The reason most operators stall at step one is the pass. Nobody wants a fourth tablet. On the Zayos Operator plus Marketplace plan at $599 per location per month, Otter pulls DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub orders into the same kitchen tablet as your direct orders, so adding a direct channel removes a screen instead of adding one. Details are on how it works and the Otter integration page.
The step by step version, with the bag insert copy and the reorder cadence, is in the guide to cutting DoorDash commission. If you want the underlying argument rather than the tactics, read whether restaurants make money on DoorDash.
Commission questions Florida owners ask.
What does delivery commission cost a Florida restaurant?
What is the difference between base commission and blended commission?
Who collects Florida sales tax on a DoorDash or Uber Eats order?
Is delivery commission ever worth paying?
How do Florida restaurants cut delivery commission without leaving the apps?
How much has a real Florida restaurant kept by going direct?
Put a real number on last month.
The free AI report takes your own volume and average ticket and tells you what the apps took. 60 seconds, no card, no call.
Keep the apps. Stop renting your regulars.