40 Food Delivery Statistics for Restaurants in 2026

Food delivery statistics usually measure how much money moves through the industry. They rarely measure how much of it stays with the restaurant.

Below are 40 figures for 2026 — market size, platform share, consumer behavior, commission ceilings, and what operators actually keep — each linked to a primary source.

A dozen stats come from our own system data and are published nowhere else.

Market size and platform scale

The two platforms that set the terms in most English-speaking markets both report publicly, which makes their filings the closest thing this industry has to audited market data.

Two things in that table matter more than the headline totals.

The first is reach: DoorDash passed 10 billion lifetime orders in mid-2025, and Uber's platform as a whole recorded $193.5 billion in gross bookings across 13.6 billion trips during the year.

The second is profitability: Delivery spent a decade as a loss-making land grab; the segment economics above are the first sustained profits the model has produced, and profitable platforms have far less reason to compete on the rates they charge restaurants.

For scale, the National Restaurant Association forecasts total US restaurant and foodservice sales at $1.55 trillion for 2026.

Delivery is a single-digit share of that number and growing several times faster than the whole. Our broader restaurant industry statistics cover the full picture.

Who owns the food delivery market now

Between 2024 and 2026, the leaders grew, and the runners-up were sold.

Wonder completed its acquisition of Grubhub in January 2025 at an enterprise value of $650 million, including $500 million of Grubhub's senior notes. Just Eat Takeaway had paid more than $7 billion for the same business in 2021 — roughly a 91% write-down in four years. The deal brought around 375,000 merchants and 200,000 couriers under Wonder.

DoorDash completed its acquisition of Deliveroo on 2 October 2025, with Deliveroo shares suspended from the London Stock Exchange the same morning. It also acquired the hospitality software company SevenRooms during the year.

The practical consequence for an independent restaurant is that in most US markets, two credible buyers now set the price for your delivery volume. That is worth understanding before signing anything — we cover the mechanics of how delivery apps hurt restaurants.

How people order: consumer statistics

Demand has stopped being a pandemic story and become a habit. According to the National Restaurant Association, close to 75% of all restaurant traffic now happens off-premises — almost three orders in four leave the building.

Read together, those numbers say something specific. Convenience is table stakes. What is left to compete on is speed, packaging, and whether the customer has a reason to come back to you rather than to the app.

What food delivery costs a restaurant

New York City runs the strictest fee-cap regime in the United States, which makes it the clearest place to see the ceiling.

Until mid-2025, a delivery app could charge a restaurant up to 23% per order there: 15% for delivery, 5% for the basic listing service, and 3% for payment processing.

Local Law 79 of 2025, in force since 30 June 2025, added an optional "enhanced service" fee of up to 20% on top. The legal maximum is now 43% of the order price—in the market with the highest in the country. Outside capped cities, no statutory limit applies.

That matters more every year, because the fee-bearing channel keeps growing as a share of the business: 41% of full-service operators say off-premises now accounts for a bigger share of sales than it did in 2019, and 60% of operators reported softer customer traffic during 2025.

The arithmetic on a single ticket is blunt. On a $35 order at a 30% blended commission, the restaurant keeps $24.50. The same order placed on the restaurant's own site costs roughly 3% in card processing and leaves $33.95. That is $9.45 a ticket, or $9,450 a month at a thousand orders.

Platform pricing is tiered rather than flat, so the rate on your own statements depends on the plan you signed. We break down DoorDash's fee tiers and how much Uber Eats charges restaurants.

Running the channel yourself moves the cost from a percentage of every ticket to a fixed line—the trade-offs are in our guide to restaurant delivery software.

What restaurants keep on their own channel

Nobody publishes what happens after a restaurant builds its own ordering channel, because the data sits inside the platforms that restaurants use. Here is ours.

In a study of 1,337 restaurants, we compared the same customers before and after they installed a restaurant's own ordering app — 72,468 people across 69 countries, on 1.2 million orders.

Order frequency for the same person rose 41% after three months, 65% after six and 87% after twelve. Average order value rose 14%.

Among restaurants with at least 100 customers in the sample, 99% saw order counts go up. A control group of 645,603 customers without the app stayed flat over the same period, moving from 2.50 to 2.52 orders a year—which rules out "the market was growing anyway" as an explanation.

A separate analysis of more than 13 million orders across 1,709 restaurants in 18 countries prices the customer base itself.

A one-time customer is worth around €31 a year. A customer who reaches ten or more orders is worth around €420—thirteen times more every year —from a list the restaurant already owns. That gap is the entire argument for a restaurant CRM.

Five numbers to track in your own restaurant

Industry averages are a starting point, not a benchmark. Five figures tell you where you actually stand:

• Orders by channel — direct site, own app, each marketplace, phone. Without this split, nothing else is interpretable.
• Average order value by channel. Marketplace baskets and direct baskets rarely match.
• Net revenue per order after commission, payment processing, and packaging — not gross.
• Repeat rate within 90 days, measured per channel. This is where owned channels separate from rented ones.
• Contactable customers — how many people you could reach tomorrow without paying anyone for the privilege.

All five sit in standard restaurant reporting tools. The discipline is looking at them monthly rather than annually.