Uber Eats Charges for UK Restaurants: What the Published Rate Card Leaves Out

If you have ever tried to find out what a delivery platform actually charges UK restaurants, you will have noticed something odd: most answers come from somebody other than the platform. Blog posts cite other blog posts. Comparison sites cite each other. Numbers circulate for years without anyone checking them against the source.

They do not have to. Uber Eats publishes a merchant rate card openly, with percentages on the page and no login required, and Just Eat publishes its two headline rates on its partner signup page. (Deliveroo is the one of the three that publishes nothing.) So the headline numbers for Uber Eats are checkable against the company that charges them.

The catch is that a published rate card is not the same as a bill. This guide covers what Uber Eats publishes, what it leaves out, and how to check the published rate against what is actually being deducted from your payouts.

What Uber Eats publishes

On its UK merchant pricing page, Uber Eats sets out three fee options depending on who delivers the order:

There is also a one-off activation fee of £650, stated on the same page as excluding VAT.

Two things about that table matter more than the percentages themselves.

First, the fee is charged on the order, and VAT is charged on the fee. Uber Eats states that its pricing does not include VAT. So a 30% marketplace fee is 30% plus 20% VAT on that 30% — an effective 36% of the order value leaving your account before you account for anything else. This is the single most common miscalculation in delivery economics, and it is not a small one: on £5,000 of monthly Uber Eats sales, the difference between "30%" and "30% plus VAT" is £300 a month. Second, the gap between 30% and 13% is the whole self-delivery argument. If you already run drivers for your own website orders, taking Uber Eats orders on self-delivery costs 13% rather than 30%. Whether that is worth it depends on whether your drivers have the capacity, and on what your own delivery costs per drop actually are — which is a calculation most restaurants have never done properly.

A caveat worth stating plainly: these are the published headline rates. Individual agreements vary — by volume, by tenure, by whatever was negotiated when you signed up, and by promotional arrangements you may have opted into. The published card tells you the standard offer, not necessarily your offer. Which brings us to the part that actually matters.

The published rate is not the number to plan with

Your effective rate — the share of gross sales you never see — is always higher than the headline commission, because commission is only one of the deductions. A typical Uber Eats payout has some combination of:

• the marketplace fee (the published percentage)
• VAT on that fee
• refunds and order adjustments from the period
• any promotional or marketing costs you opted into
• occasionally, corrections carried over from an earlier period

None of these are hidden. They are all itemised in the Payment Details report. But because they arrive as a single net deposit, most restaurants only ever see the bottom line, and the bottom line does not tell you which component moved.

The number worth tracking is simple:

``` effective rate = (gross sales − net deposit) ÷ gross sales ```

Run that every period. If your published rate is 30% and your effective rate is coming out at 36-38%, that is roughly what VAT-on-commission alone accounts for and things are behaving normally. If it drifts to 45%, something else is going on — usually refunds, sometimes a promotion you forgot you enabled — and you want to know which before it runs for another quarter.

You can work this out for each platform with our free commission calculator, which applies the VAT-on-commission step that headline comparisons leave out.

Where the deductions show up in your reports

Uber Eats is the most transparent of the three platforms at report level as well as at pricing level. Through Uber Eats Manager you can download a Payment Details report that breaks the payout down order by order, including sales excluding VAT, the VAT on those sales, refunds, the marketplace fee, the VAT on the Uber service fee, and a payout reference ID linking each order to the bank deposit it was paid in.

That payout reference is what makes genuine reconciliation possible rather than approximate. If a week's deposit looks short, you can trace it to specific orders instead of guessing. The full workflow is in our guide to reconciling Uber Eats payouts.

It is worth appreciating how unusual this is. Deliveroo provides a weekly statement with period totals; Just Eat provides a weekly invoice. Both are perfectly usable for weekly-aggregate reconciliation, but neither lets you interrogate an individual order. If you run all three platforms, Uber Eats is the one where a discrepancy is actually investigable — see our multi-platform reconciliation guide for how to handle the three formats together.

The VAT treatment, briefly

Two separate VAT questions get tangled together constantly, so it is worth separating them.

VAT on the commission. Uber's service fee is a standard-rated supply of services to your business. If you are VAT-registered, the VAT charged on that fee is input tax, and recoverable in full — zero-rated sales are still taxable supplies, so they do not restrict recovery in the way exempt supplies would. What zero-rated food does change is the split: a menu that spans both rates needs its delivery sales apportioned rather than lumped together when you record output VAT. Our VAT on delivery commissions guide works through the apportionment, and the VAT commissions tool does the arithmetic on your own numbers. VAT on the food. That is a separate question governed by the nature of what you sell. HMRC's guidance is clear that "hot takeaway food and drink that meets certain tests set out below is standard-rated," while "cold takeaway food and drink is zero-rated, as long as it's not of a type that's always standard-rated." Your food VAT does not change because the order came through a platform.

Getting these two confused — usually by assuming that zero-rated food means no VAT anywhere in the transaction — is the most common source of delivery VAT errors we see described.

HMRC already has your Uber Eats numbers

Under the Platform Operators (Due Diligence and Reporting Requirements) Regulations 2023, platforms must collect and verify information about their sellers and report it. Regulation 3 requires a reporting platform operator to establish procedures to "collect information about sellers", "verify the information collected", and "identify reportable sellers in respect of each reportable period", with records retained "for a period of five years beginning with the day after the end of the reportable period to which they relate."

In practice this means the figures Uber Eats reports about your business and the figures on your tax return should agree. They generally do — but restaurants that reconcile net deposits rather than gross sales sometimes understate turnover without realising it, because the commission never appears in the books as a cost. You can check where you stand with our free HMRC readiness checker, or read the fuller explanation in our guide to HMRC's digital platform reporting rules.

Key takeaways

• Uber Eats publishes UK merchant rates openly: 30% for Uber-delivered marketplace orders, 13% for self-delivery, 13% for pick-up, plus a £650 activation fee — all stated as excluding VAT.
• Add 20% VAT to the commission itself. A 30% headline rate is closer to 36% of order value in cash terms.
• Published rates are the standard offer, not a guarantee of your agreement. Track your effective rate from your own payouts instead of planning from the headline.
• Uber Eats is the only one of the three platforms whose report lets you trace a specific order to a specific bank deposit.
• Keep VAT on the commission and VAT on the food as separate questions. They have different answers.

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Reconciling one platform is manageable. Doing it across three, each with a different report format and a different level of detail, every week, while keeping the VAT correct on each, is where the time goes. That is the gap PayoutLedger is being built to close: upload each platform's report, get VAT-correct journals, and reconcile every payout to the bank deposit. Join the waitlist for early access.

Sources

• Uber Eats — UK merchant pricing
• HMRC — Catering, takeaway food and VAT (Notice 709/1)
• Platform Operators (Due Diligence and Reporting Requirements) Regulations 2023, regulation 3 (due diligence and record-keeping)
• Platform Operators (Due Diligence and Reporting Requirements) Regulations 2023, regulation 4 (reporting of information to HMRC)
• VAT Notice 706: partial exemption