What are the Busiest Days for Restaurant Food Delivery?

Whether it's families enjoying a meal together on Christmas or couples planning a Valentine's Day date night at home, people are celebrating special occasions with food delivery.

Wondering if DoorDash is busy on holidays like New Year's Eve, Easter, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving? Keep reading to find out the busiest holidays and special occasions for food delivery, as well as tips on preparing your kitchen for high order volume days.

What are the busiest holidays for restaurant food delivery?

Here are the top 20 busiest holidays and special occasions for food delivery in 2024, based on the average number of deliveries with DoorDash per open restaurant location*:

1. Christmas (Wednesday, December 25, 2024)

2. New Year's Day (Monday, January 1, 2024)

3. Cinco de Mayo (Sunday, May 5, 2024)

4. Mother's Day (Sunday, May 12, 2024)

5. St. Patrick's Day (Sunday, March 17, 2024)

6. Easter (Sunday, March 31, 2024)

7. Thanksgiving (Thursday, November 28, 2024)

8. Memorial Day (Monday, May 27, 2024)

9. Labor Day (Monday, September 2, 2024)

10. Valentine's Day (Wednesday, February 14, 2024)

11. New Year's Eve (Tuesday, December 31, 2024)

12. Father's Day (Sunday, June 16, 2024)

13. Game Day (Sunday, February 11, 2024)

14. Presidents' Day (Monday, February 19, 2024)

15. Independence Day (Thursday, July 4, 2024)

16. Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Monday, January 15, 2024)

17. Saturday after Thanksgiving (Saturday, November 30, 2024)

18. Halloween (Thursday, October 31, 2024)

19. Day after Christmas (Thursday, December 26, 2024)

20. Thanksgiving Eve (Wednesday, November 27, 2024)

Key takeaways for restaurants about the busiest holidays for food delivery

• Christmas and New Year's Day were the top two busiest holidays for food delivery for the third year in a row. 

• In 2024, Cinco de Mayo had more DoorDash orders than Mother's Day, a notoriously busy day for restaurants. Restaurant operators might want to consider offering margaritas and other alcohol for delivery** for consumers to pair with their celebratory tacos.  

• Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day both jumped three spots in the rankings in 2024, as more consumers chose to order delivery instead of cooking. 

• On the other hand, New Year's Eve slipped from the #6 spot in 2023 to #11 in 2024, perhaps as consumers decided to go out to ring in the new year. 

• Curious about the slowest holidays for food delivery? Christmas Eve and Black Friday were at the bottom of the list in 2024. Perhaps families were cooking together on Christmas Eve and enjoying Thanksgiving leftovers on Black Friday. 

• While it's common knowledge that Fridays and Saturdays are busy days for food delivery, restaurants should note that Sundays are gaining momentum. In fact, of the top 100 busiest days for delivery in 2024 (not just holidays), 40 were Fridays, 39 were Sundays, and only 20 were Saturdays. 

• If a holiday falls on a weekday, the surrounding weekend days may see a spike in food deliveries. For example, since Presidents' Day falls on a Monday, consumers in 2024 settled into the long weekend by ordering delivery on the Friday before — making it nearly as busy as Cinco de Mayo. 

Looking for more tips? Check out our guides on how restaurants can make the most of Valentine's Day, Game Day, Mother's Day, St. Patrick's Day, and Christmas — and learn best practices for keeping delivery food hot on busy days. 

Planning for the busiest holidays for restaurants

Wondering how to prepare your restaurant staff for these high order volume days? Here are a few tips to manage restaurant operations on the busiest holidays for food delivery:

• Add photos and descriptions to your menu. Before the big day, work to optimize your store page on DoorDash by adding photos(including menu photos, logos, and header photos), as well as menu descriptions.  

• Staff up for these holidays. You may want to have an expo overseeing delivery orders, or double-checking each order before handing them to Dashers so you avoid having missing or incorrect items.

• Optimize your kitchen layout. Consider setting up a lane specifically for takeout orders, with a kitchen display system (KDS) or tickets for delivery orders going directly there.

• Minimize your DoorDash store downtime. Downtime measures the amount of time DoorDash is unavailable to your customers during business hours. If your kitchen gets too busy, DoorDash partners can update their store status to "Busy," which adds prep and delivery time to orders. 

• Update your menu in real time. Need to 86 a menu item? Use DoorDash's menu manager tools to temporarily deactivate items on your DoorDash menu.

For more tips on managing your DoorDash business, read our Learning Center article How to Quickly Train Your Team to Use DoorDash. 

Maximize holiday delivery sales with DoorDash 

By understanding which national holidays are likely to be the busiest for food delivery, operators can build a restaurant marketing strategy that engages guests and drives revenue. 

Want tips to drive food delivery sales on popular holidays? Download the free Social Media Holiday Calendar for Restaurants to get a calendar of 350+ national and social media holidays plus creative marketing strategies for restaurants to drive sales year-round.

Interested in partnering with DoorDash? Explore our products and pricing. 

*Methodology: We examined DoorDash Marketplace data from January 2024 - December 2024 to reveal which holidays and special occasions generated the most delivery orders for restaurant partners. To capture accurate insights, we adjusted data to only account for stores open during this time period (i.e., stores that had at least $50 in sales on the given day).

**Alcohol delivery and alcohol sales are permitted in certain states and only to people 21+.