Amazon FBA Policy Updates 2026: Month-by-Month Tracker for Sellers

Searching for the latest Amazon FBA policy updates shouldn't require stitching together forum threads, expired news posts, and half-remembered fee tables. This page is our running month-by-month tracker of every FBA policy change that matters in 2026 — what changed, when it took effect, and what a working seller should actually do about it. We update it as new changes land, so bookmark it and check back monthly.

Two ground rules before the timeline. First, the changes that define 2026 economics didn't all start in 2026 — the reimbursement overhaul carried over from 2025 still does the most damage, so it gets its own section. Second, we only log changes we can verify against Amazon's own announcements and what we see across client accounts at our reconciliation desk — no rumor-mill entries.

Still in force from 2025: the reimbursement reset

Before the monthly log, the two carried-over changes every 2026 seller must have internalized:

• Cost-based reimbursements. Since March 2025, Amazon reimburses lost and damaged FBA inventory at your manufacturing or sourcing cost, not the selling price. If your per-unit cost fields in Seller Central are missing or zero, Amazon substitutes its own lower internal estimate — so accurate, invoice-backed cost data is now a direct revenue input.
• ~60-day claim windows. Most reimbursement claims must be filed within roughly 60 days of the discrepancy surfacing, down from the old 18-month lookback. Annual and quarterly audit habits forfeit money by design now; monthly is the minimum viable rhythm.

Our full breakdown of both — plus the audit routine that adapts to them — is in the Amazon FBA reimbursement policy 2026 guide, and the step-by-step claim process lives in our complete guide to recovering lost FBA reimbursements.

January 2026: monthly capacity limits and the new fee schedule

January brought the year's structural reset on the inventory side. Amazon moved storage capacity from a quarterly to a dynamic monthly allocation model, measured in cubic feet rather than units, recalculated from your sales history, IPI score, product category, and Amazon's own warehouse availability. Bulky SKUs now burn allocation fast, and even strong accounts can lose capacity when the network tightens. We covered the mechanics and the defense playbook in our FBA storage limits and IPI restock strategy guide.

The 2026 fee schedule also took hold on January 15, with fulfillment fee increases averaging around $0.08 per unit across the catalogue. Modest in isolation — meaningful across a container.

That average hides the structural part of the change. US fulfillment fees were restructured into three selling-price bands: under $10, $10–$50, and over $50. The same physical unit can now carry a different fulfillment fee depending on what it sells for, and the increases were distributed unevenly across those bands — as reported, roughly +$0.12 per unit under $10, +$0.25 in the $10–$50 band, and up to +$0.51 above $50 for small standard-size items. Higher-priced SKUs absorbed the largest share.

Amazon's own announcement confirms the January 15 date and the $0.08 average (Amazon Selling Partners); the per-band figures come from published rate-card republications rather than from Amazon's public page, since the US rate card itself sits behind a Seller Central login.

If you haven't re-run your unit economics since the new schedule, do it in our FBA calculator before your next purchase order — and note that price banding means a pricing change is now also a fee change.

Seller action: re-check margins at the new fee levels, confirm which price band each SKU falls into, and start managing restocks against a monthly cubic-feet budget rather than quarterly unit counts.

February 2026: no major changes

No headline policy change landed in February. That made it the right month for the housekeeping January demanded: verifying per-unit manufacturing costs in Seller Central for every active SKU, and reconciling January's inbound shipments while the roughly 60-day claim window on them was still open. Quiet months are when the claim-deadline math is easiest to get ahead of.

That second job is the one sellers keep deferring, because in a spreadsheet it is genuinely tedious. It does not have to be a spreadsheet — Leviathan Recon turns a month's inbound reconciliation into a list you work through, which is roughly the difference between a habit that survives a busy quarter and one that quietly lapses in March.

March 2026: Amazon India zero-rates referral fees under ₹1,000

Effective March 16, 2026, Amazon India removed referral fees entirely on products priced under ₹1,000, across 1,800+ categories covering more than 12.5 crore products — up roughly tenfold from the 1.2 crore products covered in 2025. The categories span t-shirts, shoes, earphones, bed sheets, sarees, electric kettles, coffee tables, chairs and pet accessories, among others. Amazon put the combined saving, including logistics reductions, at up to 70% in fees (Amazon press release, Amazon.in fee updates, effective March 16, 2026).

Closing fees were reduced on the low-price bands in the same release, and Easy Ship fees came down by over 20% for products under ₹300. FBA pick-and-pack and weight-handling fees were not changed by this announcement — the saving is on the referral and closing side, not on fulfilment.

The structural consequence is a hard cliff at ₹1,000 rather than a gentle curve. A t-shirt at ₹999 pays no referral fee at all; the same t-shirt at ₹1,001 pays the full category rate, which for apparel can be 23%. Pricing decisions either side of that line now move the fee stack far more than they move revenue, and for sub-₹1,000 items the closing fee becomes the largest single fee line rather than an afterthought.

Seller action: re-check every SKU sitting just above ₹1,000. Some will earn more net at ₹999 than at ₹1,099. Our FBA calculator itemises referral, closing, pick-and-pack and storage separately for India so you can see the cliff rather than infer it.

March 2026: DD+7 payout policy goes live

The year's biggest cash-flow change. Under DD+7 (delivery date plus seven days), Amazon holds the funds from each sale until seven days after the order is delivered before releasing them for disbursement. Every FBA seller feels this as a one-time working-capital gap as the policy takes hold — and a permanently longer cash conversion cycle after it.

DD+7 also raises the stakes on everything else on this page: when payouts run slower, the money Amazon owes you from lost inventory and fee errors matters more, and the ~60-day windows to claim it don't pause. If March's disbursement dip surprised you, that's the policy, not your sales.

Seller action: rebuild your 13-week cash forecast with the delivery-plus-seven lag, and tighten your reimbursement recovery loop to offset the squeeze.

April 2026: fuel and logistics surcharges, US/CA and UK/EU

Two surcharges took effect on April 17, 2026, both calculated on the fulfillment fee itself rather than on the sale price, and both applying on top of the January schedule rather than replacing any part of it.

• US and Canada: 3.5%. Applied to FBA fulfillment fees, with Multi-Channel Fulfillment and Buy with Prime following on May 2. Reported at roughly $0.17 per unit on average for US FBA, varying with size and weight (Supply Chain Dive, Digital Commerce 360).
• UK and EU: 1.5%. Amazon's own UK pricing page carries the note: "Starting from April 17, 2026, a 1.5% fuel and logistics-related surcharge will be applied to fulfilment fees." It covers FBA in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and Belgium (Amazon UK pricing).

Because the surcharge is a percentage of the fulfillment fee, it compounds the January restructure rather than sitting beside it: a SKU that moved up a price band in January now pays the surcharge on the higher fee too. Sellers were also still absorbing DD+7's cash-flow impact through April, which made it the first full month under both the new disbursement timing and the new fee stack.

Seller action: add the surcharge as an explicit line in your unit economics rather than folding it into a single fee number, so you can see what a fee change actually costs you. Our FBA calculator shows it as its own line for the US.

May 2026: no major changes

Another quiet month on the announcement front. Worth noting from our audit work: quiet months are consistently when discrepancy backlogs build, because attention drifts. Half-year mark approaching, the sellers in the best shape were the ones running the monthly reconciliation rhythm regardless of whether the news feed gave them a reason to.

June 2026: prep and labeling wind-down planning

No single dated change landed in June, but one announced shift dominated seller planning: Amazon is ending its FBA prep and labeling services in the US during 2026. Sellers who have relied on Amazon to bag, wrap, or label inventory need a replacement — supplier-side prep, a third-party prep center, or in-house handling — before the service disappears from their workflow.

Two consequences to plan for: a new per-unit prep cost in your margin model, and a transition period where inbound errors (wrong labels, missed prep, check-in shortfalls) get more likely, not less. Receiving discrepancies are claimable — inside the window. If prep is moving to your supplier, our FBA management team recommends test shipments before you commit full volume.

July 2026: no major changes

No new FBA policy change took effect in July. The live checklist for the second half of the year: per-unit cost data verified and invoice-backed, June and July inbound shipments reconciled while claimable, a prep plan in place ahead of the US service retirement, and cash forecasts running on DD+7 timing. We'll update this section if anything lands before month-end.

Watching for the rest of 2026

What we're monitoring for the back half of the year: the completion of the US prep/labeling retirement, any follow-on adjustments to reimbursement claim windows or documentation standards, and the usual pre-Q4 storage and fee maneuvering. Changes will be logged here as they take effect.

If keeping up with this — and filing the claims each change generates — is not the best use of your week, that's the job we do. Ask for a free account audit and we'll show you what the 2026 rules have cost your account so far, and what's still recoverable inside the open windows.