Your Zomato, Swiggy orders likely to get expensive from tomorrow: Here’s all you need to know

You will need to pay a lot more for your Zomato and Swiggy orders from tomorrow, i.e, January 1, 2022. The food orders made via food delivery applications beyond Zomato and Swiggy will be liable to pay a 5 percent goods and services tax (GST) on their restaurant services, as per government guidelines announced earlier this year.

So, with the new year coming in, you might just learn to cook at home or be ready to pay extra for your online food orders.

Zomato, Swiggy food orders to get costlier?

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the move at the 45th meeting of the GST Council back in the month of September this year. Sitharaman announced that food delivery platforms such as Swiggy and Zomato will need to pay GST on behalf of their partner restaurants including cloud kitchens and central kitchens offered via the platform.

With this move, the central government wants to curb tax evasions by restaurants, which are required to collect as well as deposit GST to the government. It must be noted that restaurants charge their customers GST on each order placed via the food delivery apps but do not pay taxes to the government, which should not be the case.

If you use a food delivery app regularly, you must know that these platforms charge extra taxes from all customers on each of their orders.

Under the new GST rule, the central government moved the responsibility of tax collection from restaurants’ shoulders to food aggregators such as Swiggy and Zomato. On paper, this should not impact the customers but it is likely that these food delivery apps might introduce a fee for the additional work that they need to carry out on behalf of restaurants.

For the unaware, these online food delivery platforms already charge 5 percent extra GST over and above the 18 percent GST that you already pay to the restaurants. So, technically you are not paying any extra money to the government but it is highly possible that these food aggregators might charge customers extra money for the new tax structure.

It should be noted that Zomato, Swiggy, and any other food delivery applications have not commented on the matter or highlighted anything on charging extra from customers once the new GST rule comes into effect.

You must also note that the GST rule is applied only to food services and not grocery delivery like Swiggy Instamart or Swiggy Genie.

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