Ask anyone running a counter in this city what the delivery apps are allowed to take and the answer comes back the same: fifteen percent. It is the number from the 2021 headlines, the number in the council statements, the number operators repeat to each other across a prep table. It is still a real number. It is no longer the whole one.
Stacked takeout containers waiting in a delivery bag. The same order reaches the kitchen as a different number depending on how it came in.
THE CITY'S OWN FLYER LISTS FOUR CAPS AND ONLY ONE READS FIFTEEN PERCENT
In April 2026 the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection published a flyer asking New Yorkers for comment on the delivery fee caps. It lists what an app may charge a restaurant. Fifteen percent to deliver the order. Five percent to provide basic service, which the flyer defines as letting a restaurant receive delivery and pickup orders and be listed and searchable on the platform. Twenty percent to provide enhanced service. Three percent to process electronic payment, with one exception if an app pays more than three and can show proof.
Read that list twice. The fifteen is there. So is a twenty nobody talks about.
THE TWENTY PERCENT TIER CAME IN UNDER LOCAL LAW 79 AND CARRIES ONE CONDITION
The enhanced service fee is not a loophole. It is written law, layered by Local Law 79 of 2025 onto the original fee cap regime of Local Law 103 of 2021. The city put a condition on it, and that condition is where it gets interesting: an app may charge an enhanced service fee only if it also offers a basic service priced at or under the five percent cap.
So the five percent floor survived intact. What changed is what five percent now buys. Five gets a shop listed and reachable. Twenty is the price of everything the platform does after that, and a restaurant that wants what the platform does after that pays four times the basic rate for it.
STACK THE LEGAL MAXIMUM AND THE CEILING IS THIRTY EIGHT PERCENT NOT FIFTEEN
Fifteen to deliver, twenty for enhanced service, three to process. Thirty eight percent, as the legal ceiling, on the city's own published schedule.
That is a ceiling and not a bill. What any individual shop actually pays depends on what that shop signed up for, and we do not have anyone's contract. What we have is the ceiling, and the ceiling is the thing the whole city has been quoting wrong.
ON A THIRTY DOLLAR ORDER THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO CEILINGS IS FOUR FIFTY
Model it against a thirty dollar order, using the published ceilings and nobody's private agreement.
Under the old stack, fifteen plus five plus three, the platform side tops out at twenty three percent, or $6.90, and $23.10 reaches the shop. Under the enhanced stack, fifteen plus twenty plus three, the platform side tops out at thirty eight percent, or $11.40, and $18.60 reaches the shop. The gap is four dollars and fifty cents on a single order.
Now put food under it. At a standard thirty percent food cost, that thirty dollar order carries roughly nine dollars of ingredients. Under the enhanced ceiling the shop is working with $18.60, and nine of it is spoken for before anyone turns on a burner. Labor, rent, gas, packaging, and whatever is left over all come out of $9.60. Run that same order through the register at the counter and the shop keeps thirty.
The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection owes the City Council a report on the fee caps, and the comment window has already closed.
DCWP OWES A REPORT ON THE CAPS AND THE COMMENT WINDOW CLOSED IN MAY
The law does not just set the caps. It requires the department to report back on them, with recommendations on whether to keep them or move them. The April flyer was the department collecting evidence for exactly that, and the questions it put to restaurants are worth reading on their own. Do you make a profit from online orders from apps. Is using an app necessary to compete for customers. Have apps refused service because of the fee caps. Are the caps too high, too low, or about right.
Comments closed on May 6, 2026. The report has not landed. When it does, it sets the ceiling every counter in this city operates under for the next stretch, and it will land in a news cycle where most people still think the number is fifteen.
A phone or walk-in order written by hand carries none of the platform fee stack.
THE ONLY LEVER A COUNTER CONTROLS IS WHETHER THE ORDER COMES THROUGH THE APP
A shop does not get to set the cap, argue the tier, or opt out of the platform and keep the customers the platform sends. What it controls is narrower than that and it still matters: whether a given order arrives through an app or through the door.
A phone order carries none of this stack. Neither does walking in. The tier structure, the enhanced fee, the processing percentage, all of it applies to the channel, not to the food. Same kitchen, same dish, same person cooking it, and a different amount of money survives the trip depending on how the order was placed. That is not a moral argument about convenience. It is arithmetic printed on a city flyer that almost nobody in New York has read.
SOURCING
NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, "We Want Your Feedback on the City's Fee Caps," April 2026. Fee cap structure and comment deadline as published. nyc.gov/assets/dca/downloads/pdf/about/FeeCapFlyer-April2026.pdf
Local Law 103 of 2021 and Local Law 79 of 2025, the fee cap laws, as cited by DCWP in its 2026 rulemaking record. nyc.gov/assets/dca/downloads/pdf/about/PublicComments-Proposed-RulesRecordkeeping-Requirements-for-TPFDS.pdf
Thirty dollar order arithmetic is NYEH's model of the published legal ceilings. It is not any operator's contract, invoice, or margin.
