Food delivery riders brave the rain to fulfill deliveries for customers in Beijing on August 27, 2025.  Photo: VCG

China's top market regulator has drafted basic requirements for food delivery platform services for public consultation. The move marks the government's latest effort to step up oversight of industries that have drawn wide social attention.

The draft, released by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) on Wednesday, focuses on platform fees and promotional practices with the aim to regulate food delivery platform services and improve service quality, and ease burdens of platform merchants through fair competition, China Media Group reported.

How to protect the rights and interests of delivery riders has long been a matter of concern. The draft highlights remuneration, working hours and social security, seeking to ensure their reasonable income and right to rest.

It demands platforms to set reasonable limits on the number of simultaneous and daily orders allocated to delivery workers, according to the report. 

Specifically, it calls for the establishment of a payment system to better align with riders' workload and intensity. Platforms should cap order-taking times to avoid excessive working hours and related health and safety risks. For those working more than four consecutive hours, fatigue warnings must be issued.

Earlier this month, the SAMR summoned some major food delivery platforms for talks regarding recent controversies over subsidies offered by those platforms, Wang Qiuping, a spokesperson of the SAMR, said at a regular press conference.

These platforms have pledged to comply with laws and regulations, refrain from unfair competition, resist vicious subsidies and promote orderly development in the industry, Wang said.

The move is aimed at steering the food delivery industry away from mere expansion toward high-quality development, said Wang Peng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences.

The draft highlights greater transparency in platform fees and standardization of promotional practices, seeking to strike a balance among merchant operating costs, consumer rights and market competition and to foster a healthier and more sustainable ecosystem, Wang told the Global Times on Wednesday.

The new policy will help platform merchants by easing the burden of excessive fees and subsidy battles, which in turn could stimulate market vitality, Wang said. He said it will also push platforms to refine their algorithm design, shifting from a sole focus on efficiency to a balance of efficiency and fairness, while promoting service upgrades and technological innovation. At the same time, the policy responds to growing calls for stronger worker protection and strengthens corporate social responsibilities, and it is expected to raise the industry's overall public standing, Wang said.

Experts noted that since the beginning of this year, food delivery platforms have engaged in a "subsidy battle" to capture user traffic and strengthen delivery capacity. Many merchants were forced to join the competition, with some platforms shifting subsidy costs onto merchants, thereby squeezing their profit margins.

The agency has recently stepped up efforts to regulate industries under the public spotlight, targeting not only the widely discussed "involution" in the food delivery sector but also irregularities in the freight industry.

The SAMR on Tuesday said that it had recently summoned Lalamove, a leading domestic intra-city freight platform, and urged it to comply with relevant government regulations and ensure fair competition.