Short answer: DoorDash charges most restaurants a commission of 15% to 30% on every delivery order, plus a 6% commission on pickup orders — and there is no flat monthly subscription. The exact percentage depends on which partnership plan you're on, and there are a handful of smaller fees stacked on top that most owners never see broken out.
That's the headline. The rest of this post pulls each fee out into the open, because the whole reason DoorDash's cost is so easy to underestimate is that it never arrives as a single bill — it's skimmed off the top of every ticket, one order at a time.
A quick note on where I'm coming from: I've spent twenty years building payment systems, and I've also taken hundreds of DoorDash deliveries myself. So I've watched this from inside the transaction — what the restaurant loses, what the driver nets, what the customer actually pays. The numbers below are the standard published US rates; your contract can differ, so always check your own agreement.
How much does DoorDash charge restaurants per order?
DoorDash's core charge is a commission — a percentage of each order's subtotal (the food, before tax and tips). It's tiered by the partnership plan you sign up for:
| Plan | Delivery commission | Pickup commission |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | 15% | 6% |
| Plus | 25% | 6% |
| Premier | 30% | 6% |
So on a $40 delivery order, DoorDash takes $6 on the Basic plan, $10 on Plus, or $12 on Premier — before you've paid for the food, the labor, or the packaging. Pickup orders (where the customer collects the food themselves) are charged a flat 6% across every plan, because DoorDash isn't paying a driver.
What's the difference between the plans?
You're mostly paying for visibility and reach:
- Basic (15%) — the cheapest commission, but the smallest delivery radius and the lowest placement in the app. Fewer customers see you.
- Plus (25%) — a wider delivery area and access to DashPass, DoorDash's subscription program whose members order more often and get "free" delivery. More orders, higher cut.
- Premier (30%) — the largest delivery area, top placement, and a "Growth Guarantee" (if you don't get a promised number of orders, they refund the difference in credits).
The trap is obvious once you see it: the plan that brings you the most orders also takes the biggest slice of each one. More volume at 30% can still mean thinner margins than less volume at 15%. That trade-off is exactly the kind of thing worth running the actual numbers on rather than guessing.
Does DoorDash charge restaurants a monthly fee?
No — there's no flat monthly subscription for the standard Marketplace plans. You pay per order through commission, so a slow month costs you less and a busy month costs you more. That sounds friendly, but it's also why the cost is so easy to lose track of: there's no invoice that makes you flinch, just a percentage quietly leaving with every order.
The one place a recurring charge can show up is hardware. If you use a DoorDash-provided tablet to receive orders, there may be a small weekly tablet fee (often waived if you use your own device or take orders through your POS). It's minor next to commission, but it's there.
What other fees does DoorDash charge?
Commission is the big one, but it's not the only one. Depending on how you're set up, you may also pay:
- Payment processing (on Storefront) — DoorDash Storefront lets you offer commission-free ordering on your own website, but it still charges roughly 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction to process the card, just like any payment processor. "Commission-free" is not the same as "free."
- Marketing and promotions — Sponsored Listings (ads inside the app) and promotions like "$0 delivery fee" or "20% off" are optional, but they come out of your pocket on top of commission. Many restaurants feel pressured into them to stay visible.
- Error charges and adjustments — when an order is wrong, missing an item, or refunded, the cost is often charged back to the restaurant.
- Chargebacks — disputed transactions can be deducted, same as with any card payment.
None of these are hidden, exactly — they're all in the agreement. But stacked together, they're why the percentage that actually leaves your business is usually higher than the commission number on the plan.
So how much does that add up to?
This is the number that actually matters, and it's the one nobody hands you. A single 25% cut on a $40 order feels survivable. The same 25% across, say, $8,000 of monthly delivery sales is $2,000 a month — $24,000 a year — gone before food cost, labor, or rent.
Because the fee is per-order and buried in each ticket, the only honest way to know your real exposure is to add it up across a month of your own sales. That's exactly what our free DoorDash fee calculator does — you put in your monthly delivery volume and average ticket, and it shows the monthly and yearly total in plain dollars. If you've never seen that figure written out, it's usually a wake-up call.
Can restaurants reduce DoorDash fees?
Some, yes — with trade-offs:
- Promote pickup orders, which are only charged 6% instead of 15–30%. Every order a customer collects themselves is a much cheaper order for you.
- Drop to a lower plan if the extra reach of Plus or Premier isn't actually paying for itself. More visibility isn't worth it if each order costs you more than it makes.
- Move volume to your own channel. DoorDash Storefront (or your own ordering page) cuts the commission but keeps the payment-processing fee. I broke down that exact trade-off in DoorDash Storefront Fees: what "commission-free" really costs, and the bigger-picture margin damage in What DoorDash's fees actually cost your restaurant.
There's no magic switch that makes delivery free — but there's a big difference between paying DoorDash's fees on purpose, as a marketing cost you've measured, and paying them by default because you never added them up.
The bottom line
DoorDash charges restaurants 15–30% per delivery order, 6% on pickup, no monthly subscription, plus payment processing on Storefront and optional marketing costs on top. The commission itself is straightforward — the danger is that it's invisible, skimmed one ticket at a time, so most owners badly underestimate the yearly total.
Don't estimate it. Run your own numbers and see the real figure. Once it's in dollars instead of a percentage, every decision about delivery gets a lot clearer.
