Refund dispute deadlines: how long you have on each platform
There is no single deadline. Each platform gives you a different window to dispute a refund charged to you or a charge you do not recognise, and it runs from seven days to a month. Assuming it is thirty days everywhere, as it is on Uber Eats, is the mistake that costs the most money.
This is a guide for restaurant operators, franchise managers and dark kitchen teams. When a platform charges a refund back to you or applies a deduction you do not recognise, you have the right to dispute it. What almost nobody has straight is how long you have, and that is where the money leaks: not in the argument, but in the calendar.
The common belief is that you get thirty days for everything, as on Uber Eats. You do not. Each platform sets its own window, counts it from a different point (the order, the notice of the charge, or the statement) and, in one case, publishes one deadline in the help centre and a shorter one in the contract you signed. By the time you review the statement at month end, several of those windows have already closed and the charge is final.
How long each platform gives you
These are the deadlines we verified in each platform’s own merchant documentation for the UK, as retrieved on 22 September 2026. The clock does not always start on the order date: sometimes it runs from the notice of the charge, and sometimes from the invoice statement.
| Platform | Deadline to dispute | Counts from | Where you dispute |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uber Eats | 30 days per the help centre; 14 calendar days per the contract. | Order date (help centre) or notice of the adjustment (contract). | Uber Eats Manager, against the order; payment disagreements at [email protected]. |
| Deliveroo | 7 days for a refund, plus 72 hours to appeal a rejection; up to 4 weeks for a cancellation charge. | Refund issue date, or the invoice statement date. | Partner Hub: Refunds for refunds, Invoices & Payments for cancellation charges. |
| Just Eat | 14 days to object to a charge on the statement. | Delivery of the Tax Invoice/Statement. | Partner Hub; the charge reverses on the next invoice if upheld. |
One rule holds for all three: you dispute against the individual order, never against the monthly total. If you start from the aggregated statement figure there is no case to make, and you are already late.
Uber Eats: thirty days in the help centre, fourteen in the contract
Two official deadlines coexist on Uber Eats, and it pays to know it: the help centre gives thirty days from the order date, but the Merchant Terms and Conditions you signed cut the window to fourteen calendar days from when you are notified of the adjustment. The shorter one governs, so the safe rule is to dispute as soon as the deduction appears, not when the admin gets done.
That adjustment is the same mechanism whether it is a customer refund charged to you, an uncollected order or a retroactive deduction, and thirty days is the figure you see in the portal. The contract puts it plainly: you may dispute the adjustment “through the Uber Tools within fourteen (14) calendar days of Merchant being notified of such adjustment”.
Disputes go in through Uber Eats Manager, against the order, with the evidence attached. This is the same thirty-day window covered in the guide to Uber Eats order error adjustments.
Deliveroo: seven days for a refund, four weeks for a cancellation charge
Deliveroo runs three different clocks, and mixing them up loses money. To dispute a refund charged to you, the Partner Policies tell partners to “log into Hub within 7 days of our refund email notification”, and the Partner Hub guide sets the same window as “within 7 days of the refund issue date”. The clock starts with the refund, not the order, so a week of unopened partner mail is a week of charges nobody can challenge any more.
If the dispute is rejected there is a second window, and it is the one most operators never use: you can “reply to the decision email within 72 hours to contact Support for further review”. Seventy-two hours is not long enough to go looking for proof, which is the whole argument for having it attached to the order before the refund ever arrives.
A cancellation charge is a separate case again: you dispute it through the Hub, under Invoices & Payments, “up to 4 weeks after the invoice statement date”, and “any disputes after these 4 weeks will be instantly rejected”. Compensation for an order left without a rider is different too: Deliveroo pays it automatically as an adjustment on your statement, so there is no claim window to hit there. In our own filing we find the usable seven-day window is shorter still: the disputes we file that go through go in within about a day of the refund appearing. The detail is in the guide to disputing Deliveroo refunds.
Just Eat: fourteen days to object to the statement
Just Eat does not publish a single day count for a refund dispute the way Uber Eats does; the day-to-day dispute is raised through the Partner Hub, and if it is upheld the charge reverses on the next invoice. What is fixed is the contract: the partner terms give you fourteen days to object to the statement that carries the charge.
The Just Eat Partner Terms state that if you disagree with any Tax Invoice/Statement, you must give notice “within 14 (fourteen) days from the delivery of the Tax Invoice/Statement”, or it is treated as accepted. One extra case worth knowing on Just Eat’s own delivery: if a rider arrives more than ten minutes after your preparation time, you are eligible for re-cook compensation, claimed through the Partner Hub.
Why the deadline is what costs you the money
On paper, an unfair charge is disputed and recovered. In practice it is lost to the deadline. The charge appears days after the order, almost always inside the statement, and by the time you open the monthly summary several of these windows (Deliveroo’s seven days, Uber Eats’ fourteen under the contract) have already closed.
A monthly review is structurally too late. The only routine that does not lose money is to check charges every day and dispute on the day they land, with that order’s evidence already prepared. And you have to be selective: dispute what is unfair and accept what was genuinely your error, because disputing everything in bulk gets a bulk answer, almost always a no.
How Bronze claims it back
Bronze photographs and verifies every order with computer vision before it leaves the kitchen, and stores that photo with its capture time. When a refund or a charge lands that should not have, the evidence for that order already exists, inside each platform’s window. More than half are handled without your team lifting a finger.
The format is not a guess. Deliveroo’s own guidance says evidence must include either “a visible timestamp within 20 minutes of the ‘prep for time’ or ‘order ready’ time” or “a visible order ID or order receipt”, and it suggests “placing a tablet above the packing station to photograph items and the order receipt before sealing the bag”. Uber Eats, for its part, accepts photos of the sealed bag showing the order number. A photo taken at the pass, tied to the order and to the minute, is the artefact both of them describe, and a 20-minute tolerance is not something you can reconstruct days later from a statement.
The reference figures, as of July 2026: 83% of disputes filed with photo evidence are won (disputes resolved in the last 12 months), and Bronze has recovered €2.2M for its customers across 450+ restaurants and more than 5,000,000 verified orders. It is the same mechanism behind disputing unfair refunds and behind claiming an order prepared but not collected. See Bronze Tracker for how the verification works.
Sources
The deadlines and quoted wording come from each platform’s own UK merchant documentation, retrieved on 22 September 2026. Platform terms change without notice, so keep the retrieval date and re-read the source before you turn a deadline into a routine for your team.
- Uber Eats for Merchants (UK), Order errors learning centre (the 30 days): merchants.ubereats.com. Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- Uber Eats Merchant Terms and Conditions, Great Britain (the 14 calendar days from notice of the adjustment): uber.com/legal. Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- Deliveroo Partner Policies (the 7-day refund window): merchants.deliveroo.com, and Deliveroo Help on cancellation charges (the 4 weeks from the invoice statement): help.deliveroo.com. Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- Deliveroo Help, how to manage and dispute refunds in Partner Hub (the 7 days from the refund issue date, the 72-hour reply to a rejection, the 20-minute timestamp rule and the packing-station tablet): help.deliveroo.com. Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- Just Eat Partner Terms and Conditions, clause 8.9 (the 14 days to object to the Tax Invoice/Statement), and the Partner Hub refund process: partnerinfo.just-eat.co.uk. Retrieved 22 September 2026.
