Zomato and Swiggy Commission: What Restaurants Actually Pay in 2026

An aggregator order gets cut in more than one place. Roughly in this order:

• Commission. The big one. Usually somewhere between 18% and 25% of order value, though the rate moves with your city, your contract and how long you have been on the platform.
• Payment gateway charges. Around 2% to 3% on the online-paid portion.
• GST on the commission. 18% charged on the commission amount itself, not on the order.
• Ads and promotions. Optional on paper. In practice most kitchens spend here to stay visible.
• Discount share. When a deal runs, some of it comes out of your side.
• Packaging. Yours to pay, and nobody reimburses it.

Stack those up and the take rate on a discounted, ad-supported order lands nearer 35% to 40% than the headline number. Rates and structures change, so read your own contract and payout statement rather than a figure someone quoted you.

Take a single dish and run it through. Say it sells at ₹400 on the app:

• Commission at 22%: −₹88
• GST on that commission at 18%: −₹16
• Payment gateway at 2.5%: −₹10
• Packaging: −₹25
• Food cost at 30% of menu price: −₹120

You are left with about ₹141 before rent, salaries, gas and electricity. Now run a 40% discount campaign on the same dish and that ₹141 goes close to nothing. This is the sum most kitchens never do, and it is the reason a busy delivery kitchen can still lose money every month.

You cannot do this by feel. You need the real food cost of each dish, which means recipe-linked inventory rather than a guess at 30%.

Dine-in pricing does not survive a 22% commission. Most kitchens price delivery 15% to 20% above the dine-in rate, which is standard practice and not something guests object to once packaging and convenience are in the price.

Two other things help more than people expect:

• Push combos. A higher ticket spreads the fixed packaging cost across more food.
• Keep low-margin items off the app. A dish that barely earns at the table will lose money on delivery. It does not need to be listed.

Since 2022 the aggregator collects and pays the GST on the food itself. You do not charge it again. But the commission they bill you carries its own 18% GST, and that is a different entry in your books.

Mix the two up and your GSTR-3B stops matching your sales. Get this wrong for a few months and reconciliation becomes a proper headache. Our GST billing guide for restaurants covers how these entries should sit.

Short answer: yes, alongside the apps rather than instead of them. The apps bring discovery you cannot buy cheaply. A direct channel brings margin you cannot get anywhere else.

A direct order over WhatsApp or a QR menu carries no commission at all. Even shifting 15% of your repeat customers to direct ordering changes your monthly P&L noticeably, because those are the orders you were already going to get.

The practical move is to put a card in every delivery bag with a QR code and a small discount for ordering direct next time. It costs almost nothing and it compounds.

None of this is visible if app orders live in a tablet on the wall and your counter sales live somewhere else. You want one view: channel-wise sales, channel-wise margin, and what each order actually earned after deductions.

Billing Rasoi pulls Zomato and Swiggy orders into the same queue as counter and QR orders, so the reports compare like with like. See the cloud kitchen software setup, or run a 14-day trial against a real week of your own orders.