ezCater Commission: What Restaurants Pay in 2026

How much does ezCater charge restaurants?

ezCater charges restaurants nothing upfront: no signup fee and no monthly fee. It earns a commission on each accepted order, reported around 15% in 2026, plus a 2.99% payment transaction fee. Optional ezDispatch delivery adds $30 on orders under $300, or 10% above that. A delivered marketplace order typically costs 18% to 28% all-in.

ezCater does not publish its marketplace commission anywhere on ezcater.com, which is exactly why this question gets searched so often. The rate is set in each restaurant's partner agreement. Third-party fee guides and operator reports in 2026 (FlashCater's comparison guide is the most detailed public source) consistently land on roughly 15% of the food subtotal as the standard rate, with effective rates ranging from about 10% to over 20% once volume, account terms, and promotional placement are factored in. The 2.99% payment transaction fee is documented in ezCater's own partner help center and does not apply to voluntary tips.

Here is the full fee sheet:

The flip side is worth stating plainly: the customer pays no markup on ezCater. ezCater's own explainers say customers pay the menu price, taxes, and a delivery fee, with no service or platform fees, and that delivery fees, set by each restaurant, typically run 7% to 15% of the order. The entire platform cost sits on the restaurant's side of the transaction, which is why the commission math deserves this much scrutiny.

How does ezCater's fee structure work, line by line?

Five mechanisms decide what an ezCater order actually costs: the marketplace commission, the 2.99% transaction fee, ezDispatch delivery, restaurant-funded promotions, and the weekly payment cycle. Each is individually reasonable. Stacked on a large delivered order, they can turn a $500 sale into roughly $360 of net revenue before any food or labor cost.

The marketplace commission. ezCater takes a percentage of the food subtotal on every order you accept through the marketplace. No order, no fee, which genuinely aligns the platform with bringing you demand. The rate is negotiated per agreement and not public; roughly 15% is the consistently reported standard, and larger or strategically placed accounts report better or worse terms in the 10% to 20%+ band.

The 2.99% payment transaction fee. This applies to the card transaction (voluntary tips excluded) and rides on top of the commission. It is how a "15%" relationship becomes roughly 18% of the transaction before delivery enters the picture.

ezDispatch delivery fees. If you have no drivers, ezCater's delivery network will cover the last mile: $30 on orders under $300, 10% of the food subtotal at $300 or more, as of July 2026. You keep the delivery fee you charge the customer, and driver gratuities go to the delivery provider. ezCater says ezDispatch reaches 97% of partner locations, covers up to 20 miles, and can staff a delivery on 90 minutes of notice. On a $500 order the fee is $50; if you charge the customer $25 for delivery, your net delivery cost is $25.

ezRewards and promoted placement. ezCater's loyalty program gives orderers at least 1 point per $1 of food, redeemable as order discounts or gift cards from 2,500 points. Some caterers fund 2x to 5x point multipliers, and restaurants can also pay for promoted placement to climb marketplace search results. Both are optional marketing levers, and both stack on top of the commission, which is how effective rates drift above the reported 15%.

When you get paid. ezCater pays weekly. The partner help center describes payouts processed on Tuesdays that land in one to two banking days, with balances under $20 rolled forward. Everything is tracked in the ezManage dashboard. For catering this matters more than it does for a $20 lunch order: a $700 corporate order delivered the day after a payout run can ride as float for the better part of a week.

What is the typical commission on catering marketplaces vs direct catering?

Catering marketplaces take 10% to 25% of each order as of July 2026. ezCater is reported around 15% plus 2.99% processing, Fooda is reported near 20%, Shef publishes 25%, and Sharebite runs a reported 12.5% to 15% because employers fund the platform. Direct catering ordering costs card processing of roughly 3% plus a flat software fee.

Details behind the table, so you can check the math against your own agreements:

CaterCow is free to join and takes its cut as a percentage deducted from each payout, covering commission, card processing, and customer service. It tells caterers the percentage varies by order and does not publish a rate.

Shef is a homemade food marketplace rather than a restaurant channel, but it answers a question people ask constantly: Shef keeps 25% and cooks keep 75% plus 100% of tips, per its help center as of July 2026. Treat that as the ceiling of the category.

Sharebite and Fooda are workplace food programs, not open marketplaces. Sharebite told TechCrunch in 2022 that restaurant fees start at 12.5%, and a 2025 SyncBite comparison pegs the standard rate at 15%, with the employer paying administrative and transaction fees on top. Fooda publishes no rate; industry roundups report a cut around 20% of popup sales, and Fooda's own partner page advertises a $200,000+ average annual revenue opportunity per restaurant.

DoorDash and Grubhub handle corporate and group catering at their standard plan rates. DoorDash's merchant pricing page lists 15% (Basic), 25% (Plus), and 30% (Premier) on delivery orders and 6% on pickup, as of July 2026. Grubhub's published packages run a 5% to 20% marketing commission by tier, plus roughly 10% more when Grubhub handles delivery, plus processing; 2026 fee guides put typical all-in delivery costs at 15% to 30%.

Catering software in your POS (HungerRush and similar catering modules) is a different category entirely: quoted SaaS subscriptions with no commission, but also no demand. It solves operations, not customer acquisition.

The structural difference to remember: a marketplace charges a percentage of every order forever, while a direct channel charges a fixed cost that dilutes as volume grows. Which one wins depends entirely on whether an order is a first order or a repeat order, and that is what the worked example below shows.

What does a $500 catering order pay out, marketplace vs direct?

On a $500 corporate order with a $25 customer delivery fee, the marketplace path nets about $114 after food, labor, packaging, commission, processing, and ezDispatch. The direct path nets about $209. Same kitchen, same menu, same customer: a $95 per-order difference, roughly 18 points of margin.

Assumptions, all adjustable to your numbers: food at 32%, catering prep labor at 18% (lower than dine-in service labor), packaging at 4%, the reported 15% marketplace commission, ezDispatch at its published 10% tier, and $30 for a direct delivery via your own driver or an on-demand courier. If you route the direct order through a comparable 10% dispatch service instead, direct take-home is still about $189, a $75 gap that is pure commission. Run your own volumes through our delivery commission calculator to see the same math on your order sizes.

Scale it and the stakes get obvious. At eight catering orders a month, the $95 per-order difference is roughly $760 a month, or about $9,100 a year, on identical sales. Against a flat-fee direct platform (DirectOrders is $249 a month, commission-free), the savings on three $500 orders more than cover the subscription. The crossover points are worth memorizing: a $249 flat fee beats the marketplace's reported all-in rate of roughly 18% above about $1,384 a month in catering sales, and beats ezOrdering's roughly 10% above about $2,500 a month. Below those volumes, percentages are cheaper; above them, every additional order widens the flat-fee advantage.

One more lens: restaurant net margins run 3% to 9%. An 18-point swing in channel cost on your largest orders is not an optimization. On catering volume, it is the whole profit line.

Is ezCater worth it for restaurants?

Yes, as a customer acquisition channel, and the 2026 numbers back that up. No, as the permanent home of repeat business, because a percentage fee never stops. The honest framing: ezCater's commission is a customer acquisition cost, and it is only mispriced when you keep paying it on the 30th order from the same office.

The case for being listed is real demand you cannot easily reach yourself:

• Order sizes are large and growing. ezCater's workplace food data (published May 2025) put the average order at $420, up 12% year over year, feeding an average of 25 people.
• Workplaces actively try new restaurants. In ezCater's Q4 2025 survey of 2,300+ workplace food stakeholders, 96% of workplaces tried a new restaurant during 2025.
• Workplace orders leak into personal orders. 62% of employees who first tried a restaurant at work later ordered from it personally, and 67% recommended it to family and friends. That is marketing you are paid for.
• The demand is durable. 91% of workplaces plan to spend the same or more on food in 2026, daily and weekly meal programs grew 26% year over year, and companies are replacing cafeterias that cost over $1 million a year to operate.
• The category is big. Expert Market Research sized US catering at $77.18 billion in 2025, crossing $80 billion in 2026, on the way to a projected $140.85 billion by 2035.

The case against making it your only channel is the arithmetic from the previous section:

• A reported 15% commission plus 2.99% processing, plus 10% ezDispatch when you need delivery, adds up to 26% to 28% of a delivered transaction.
• Repeat corporate accounts do not need to be re-acquired. Paying an acquisition-sized fee on retention volume is the single largest avoidable cost in a catering P&L.
• Restaurant-funded point boosts and promoted placement mean the marketplace's effective rate tends to drift up, not down, as competition for ranking increases.

The verdict most operators land on: stay listed, treat the commission as a bounty on first orders, and deliberately move second and later orders from the same account to a channel you own.

How do restaurants build a direct catering channel?

A direct catering channel needs four pieces: a catering page with real menus, minimums, and lead times; commission-free catering ordering on your own domain; house accounts with invoicing for repeat offices; and a delivery answer. Run it alongside the marketplace and confine marketplace fees to first orders instead of every order.

1. Publish a real catering page. Package menus by headcount (breakfast for 10, lunch for 25), state your order minimum, delivery radius, and lead time, and show delivery and setup fees upfront. ezCater's own platform data shows detailed menus with photos get twice the bookings of sparse ones; the same rule applies on your site.

2. Take orders on your own domain. This is the piece that removes the percentage. A flat-fee platform like DirectOrders runs commission-free catering ordering with large-order lead times and scheduling, so a $2,000 corporate order costs the same flat monthly fee as a $200 one. If you prefer to stay inside ezCater's ecosystem, ezOrdering at 7% plus 2.99% is the middle path; the crossover math above shows where a flat fee overtakes it. And whenever a platform pitches you "zero commission", read the fee schedule for what replaces it: our breakdown of the hidden cost of zero commission platforms shows where those models recover margin.

3. Open house accounts. Offices that order weekly want a standing account, net-30 invoicing, and one contact who knows their building. None of that requires a marketplace, and it is precisely the volume you least want to pay a percentage on.

4. Convert marketplace customers the legitimate way. You cannot lift customer data from a marketplace, but every order you fulfill carries your brand into a breakroom: branded packaging, a catering menu in the bag, and a first-direct-order incentive funded by the 15% you will not be paying. The 62% personal-order spillover in ezCater's own data works in your favor here.

5. Solve delivery once. Options, roughly in cost order: your own driver for a wage plus mileage, on-demand couriers dispatched per delivery, or ezDispatch-style services at 10%. For a concentrated lunch radius, one trained driver usually beats 10% of every large order.

6. Track channel mix monthly. One number tells you if this is working: the share of catering revenue paying a percentage. Every point you move from 18% to 28% channels into a roughly 3% channel lands directly on the profit line.

Sources

All vendor pricing accessed July 2026. Where a platform does not publish rates, the figure is labeled as reported and attributed.

• ezCater Dispatch, delivery solutions (ezDispatch fees: $30 under $300, 10% at $300+)
• ezCater Restaurant Partner Help Center (payment schedule, ezOrdering commission, transaction fee)
• ezCater Online Ordering, growth solutions (ezOrdering product)
• ezCater Help Center: how delivery fees are calculated (customer-side delivery fees of 7% to 15%)
• ezCater Lunch Rush: catering service fees explained (no customer-side markups or service fees)
• ezCater Rewards program (points, multipliers, redemptions)
• ezCater press release, May 2026: workplace catering as an acquisition engine (96%, 62%, 67%, 91%, 26% figures; 125,000 restaurants; Q4 2025 survey)
• BusinessWire, May 2025: ezCater workplace food data ($420 average order value, up 12%; average headcount 25)
• Restaurant Technology News, July 2026: ezCater platform overview (cafeteria cost figure, network size)
• Expert Market Research: United States catering market ($77.18 billion in 2025, $140.85 billion projected by 2035)
• Shef Help Center: cost to get started as a shef (25% commission, 75% to cooks, 100% of tips)
• CaterCow: does it cost money to partner (unpublished percentage deducted from payouts)
• Fooda restaurant partners ($200,000+ average annual revenue opportunity claim)
• Sharebite: how it works for restaurants (employer-funded model)
• TechCrunch, June 2022: Sharebite raises $39M (restaurant fees starting at 12.5%)
• DoorDash merchant pricing (15% / 25% / 30% plans, 6% pickup)
• Grubhub for Restaurants (marketing and delivery package structure)
• FlashCater: ezCater alternatives and fee guide, 2026 (reported 15% marketplace commission, 7% ezOrdering, effective 10% to 20%+ range)