Examined Sep 25, 2026 No amount in the terms Uber will not tell you what your Uber Eats invitation is worth until you open it, and the invitation expires 90 days after it was sent.
Not one currency symbol appears in roughly 2,300 words of Uber's rules, and Uber's own wording about the amount is unusually blunt: “Referral Rewards are discretionary and the amount of a Referral Reward and the requirements to get it can vary both by city and within a city.” Every confident Uber Eats figure you have seen quoted comes from a coupon aggregator or from one person's personalized screen, not from Uber's rules. What the rules do nail down is the shape of the thing: your discount attaches through your friend's invitation and applies at checkout, and the invitation itself has a 90-day clock on it.
What pays what
| You, signing up new through a friend's invitation | A discount shown in the invitation |
|---|---|
| An invitation more than 90 days old | Expired |
| Someone who already accepted a different person's invitation | $0 |
| An invitation from someone in another country | $0 |
| A canceled order | Does not count |
Whether the credit splits across several orders, and what the minimum basket is, is not in the rules at all. Uber pushes it into the “Specific Reward Terms” attached to your invitation. If the app shows you a minimum subtotal, meaning the price of the food before taxes, fees and tip, that number came from the invitation and applies only to you.
Do this, in this order
- Get the invitation from a person, not a coupon page. Uber's rules ban making a referral link public and name where: coupon websites, job sites, Amazon, eBay, Fiverr, Craigslist, RetailMeNot, Reddit, Wikipedia, Gumtree, MoneySavingExpert, Groupon, and paid social or search ads. A code lifted from any of those can be pulled, and since the amount is personalized there is no better stranger's code.
- Read the figure on your own screen and treat everything else as noise. The one Uber-hosted page that shows a number is a help article, and the number there is the label printed on a button in one market. A figure quoted anywhere else is somebody else's offer.
- Know whose city decides. Uber states that if you sign up in a different city from the one your invitation came from, you may receive a different referral offer than the one it named. You can be invited across cities but never across countries.
- Watch the 90-day clock. An invitation expires 90 days from the date it was sent, not from when you opened it. If a code has already refused to apply, our clock-by-clock diagnosis works out why.
- Let the order complete and keep the account clean. The qualifying act for Eats is ordering and paying for a meal, and Uber says canceled orders do not count toward the minimum requirements. You must be a new user of that service, or one who “has not used the Uber service within a certain period of time”. The rules’ “referred only once” line sits in the paragraph for people who drive or deliver; the paragraph for people ordering states no such limit.
Is it worth your time?
If a first Uber Eats order was happening anyway, taking a friend's invitation costs you nothing and gets you something. The discount is real but unquotable: Uber keeps the number out of the legal text so it can move it market by market. So do not choose Uber Eats over another app because a blog promised you a figure, and do not sit on an invitation, because it expires 90 days from the date it was sent. Delivery fees, service fees and the tip sit outside whatever the code covers, so the sticker relief is usually smaller than the code implies. We set out the whole case in is the Uber Eats referral worth it?, including the two cases where the answer flips to no.
If you later become a regular Uber Eats customer and start sending invitations of your own, that side of the program pays a promo code onto your account once the person you invited orders and pays for a meal. Uber's two documents disagree on how long that code lasts: the rules say rewards “will expire 60 days from the date your invitee activates the referral offer” unless your offer says otherwise, while the help article says the code “expires after 3 months if not used”. Go by the terms shown with your own code. The rules cap payouts for “Rider, Driver, and Courier referrals” at “a combined total of 10 referral offers”; that line does not name Uber Eats, so whether Eats invitations count toward it is not stated.
