Were You Overcharged by the McDonald's App?

A $12 Order That Costs $24

The menu says what things cost. But order delivery through the McDonald's app and the menu price is not the real price. A $12.49 order picks up a service fee, a delivery fee, and a small order fee on the way to checkout. Those charges appear only after you've built your order from the listed menu prices. This is called drip pricing: advertising one price and revealing unavoidable fees later.

A typical app delivery order looks like this: mandatory fees add $9.98 to a $12.49 order, an 80% markup over the menu price.

What Pricing-Transparency Laws Require

Virginia's price transparency law, part of the Virginia Consumer Protection Act and effective July 1, 2025, says a displayed price must include all mandatory fees and charges and the listed fees must be clear and conspicuous. Taxes can be added at the end; mandatory "service fees" cannot. California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon and Massachusetts have enacted comparable requirements, and a claim is most direct in those states.

Outside those states the conduct is still covered. Every state has an unfair and deceptive trade practices law prohibiting a company from advertising a price the consumer cannot actually get, and the FTC treats undisclosed mandatory fees as a deceptive practice under Section 5 of the FTC Act. We believe this pricing tactic is improper in all 50 states.

When the app shows a menu price that no delivery customer can actually pay, because unavoidable fees raise every order's true cost, the displayed price may be unlawful on every transaction.

Why Small Fees on Cheap Food Matter

The fees on a single fast-food order look small, but the percentages are large. $9.98 in fees on a $12.49 order is a proportionally bigger markup than the fees on a restaurant delivery or hotel stay. And McDonald's app order volume means the same undisclosed fee structure repeats across an enormous number of transactions.

• Service Fee - added to app delivery orders on top of menu prices.
• Delivery Fee - a separate per-order delivery charge.
• Small Order Fee - an additional charge for orders under a minimum, which fast-food orders frequently are.

The small order fee penalizes the low order totals the menu prices invite, and the app discloses it only at checkout.

What You Could Recover

The remedy depends on your state. Virginia law allows recovery of your actual damages or $500, whichever is greater, along with your attorney fees. If the violation is found to be willful, the court may award up to three times your actual damages, or $1,000, whichever is greater. North Carolina provides mandatory treble damages plus fees. California allows actual damages or a statutory minimum plus restitution. Most state consumer-protection statutes also shift attorney fees onto the company. That is what makes a claim over a few dollars per order worth bringing.

Regular app users who ordered delivery weekly could have paid hundreds of dollars in fees that never appeared in a menu price.

Why Companies Hide Fees Instead of Raising Prices

Companies hide fees because it works.

Consumers comparison-shop on the first price they see. A company that folds its fees into the advertised price looks more expensive next to a competitor that hides them, even when the real totals are identical. Once one company in an industry hides fees, the honest pricer loses the comparison and the rest follow. That is why legislatures started writing all-in pricing rules instead of waiting for the market to fix itself.

Fast food orders are small and quick, which makes the tactic more effective. Few people abandon a $12 order over fees they notice at the last screen. The amounts feel too small to fight, even when they nearly double the bill. Across millions of app orders, small fees become a very large revenue stream.

Fee names also sound official. Labels like "service fee," "processing fee," or "regulatory fee" look like taxes or government charges, and many consumers assume someone other than the company requires them. They almost never are. They are part of the price, and the company sets them.

How to Tell If You Have a Claim

You don't need to do anything before signing up. But if you want to check for yourself, it takes about two minutes:

• Open the McDonald's app, start a delivery order, and note the menu prices you're shown.
• Proceed toward checkout and compare the total against those menu prices.
• Look for Service Fee, Delivery Fee, and Small Order Fee lines - charges that appear nowhere on the menu screens.
• Check the app's order history (and your email) for delivery orders and review their fee lines.

If the app showed you menu prices and then added unavoidable fees at checkout, that is what these laws prohibit. The app's own order history is strong evidence because it preserves itemized fees for past orders. The dates matter too: where a state's pricing-transparency statute has an effective date, orders after that date fall under the statute, and earlier orders are measured against that state's deceptive-practice law instead.

Remember: you do not need receipts to start. Signing up takes 60 seconds, and we'll tell you what documentation matters later. Even if you can't find old receipts, McDonald's has records of every order, and we can request them.

Your Rights Under Virginia's Statute and Other State Laws

The Virginia Consumer Protection Act is one of the older and stronger state consumer statutes, and § 59.1-608 plugged a specific hole in it: price advertising that is technically true (the burger really does cost $5.99) but deceptive in practice, because no delivery customer can buy at that price.

For consumers, the statute's remedies do three important things:

• They make small claims viable. Recovery of your actual damages or $500, whichever is greater — and up to three times your actual damages, or $1,000, whichever is greater, if the violation is found to be willful — together with attorney fee shifting, means a claim over a few dollars in fees per order is still worth bringing. The statute was written so companies can't hide behind the small size of each individual overcharge.
• They punish willfulness. Where a violation is willful, the three-times measure is what makes the difference. A fee structure designed into an app and shown to every customer on every order is not an accounting error.
• They cover every transaction. Each qualifying order is its own violation. A year of weekly app delivery orders is not one claim for a few dollars; it is dozens of violations that add up.

Those three features make Virginia the most direct route, and the other express pricing-transparency states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon and Massachusetts) offer comparable remedies. But the idea is not unique to those states. Advertising a price a customer cannot actually pay is deceptive everywhere, and every state's unfair and deceptive trade practices statute says so. We believe the tactic is improper in all 50 states. Where you ordered simply determines which law applies.

What They Showed You* vs. What You Actually Paid*

Figures shown are illustrative examples, not records of an actual transaction; your amounts may differ.

Frequently asked questions

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