Amazon FBA Reimbursement Policy 2026

If you searched Amazon FBA reimbursement policy 2026, here is the short version: Amazon now pays you your sourcing cost — not your selling price — when it loses or damages your inventory, you have roughly 60 days to claim most discrepancies, and the auto-reimbursement system that supposedly handles everything quietly skips the complex cases where most of the money hides. Sellers who adapted their process are claiming inside the window with cost data on file. Sellers who did not are watching recoveries shrink without necessarily seeing why.

This guide covers exactly what changed, what it costs you if you ignore it, and a monthly reconciliation routine you can run yourself under the new rules.

The cost-based reimbursement model, in plain numbers

Since March 2025, Amazon values reimbursements for lost and damaged FBA inventory at your manufacturing or sourcing cost instead of the estimated sale price. The stated logic is fair on paper — a reimbursement should make you whole for what the unit cost you, not hand you unearned retail margin.

The practical effect has been brutal. Consider a worked example: a unit you source for $6 and sell for $24. The figures below follow from those two, and are not a claim about what any account receives.

That third row is the trap. The shift explains why a seller's recoveries can fall even where the number of lost units stays flat. The units are still disappearing at the same rate — Amazon is just paying far less for each one, and least of all to sellers who never told Amazon what their inventory actually costs.

Shorter claim windows, set by case type

The second structural change is speed. Most Amazon reimbursement claim windows are around 60 days, and the exact window depends on the case type. The legacy 18-month lookback — the buffer that made annual reimbursement audits viable — is gone. Amazon's announcement of 23 October 2024 sets the windows per case type:

• Lost or damaged in a fulfillment center: no later than 60 days after the item was reported lost or damaged.
• FBA customer returns: between 60 and 120 days after the customer refund or replacement date.
• Removal shipments lost in transit: 15 to 75 days from the shipment-creation date.
• Other removal claims: within 60 days of the shipment being delivered back to you.

Do the math on what that kills:

• An annual audit is reading a year of history at once, most of it long past the point where a claim can still be filed. The audit becomes archaeology.
• A quarterly audit can find claims from the first month of the quarter already past their window.
• A monthly audit catches almost everything with time to spare — and leaves room to gather documentation before filing.

Missed windows are not a partial haircut; they are a total loss on that claim. If your reimbursement process still runs on a quarterly calendar, you are donating the difference to Amazon. Put this triage on a weekly operating rhythm: deadline risk is now the leak to watch.

Your cost data in Seller Central is now a revenue input

Under the cost-based model, the per-unit manufacturing cost you enter in Seller Central is no longer administrative trivia — it is the number Amazon multiplies by every lost unit.

Three rules follow:

1. Every active SKU needs an accurate per-unit sourcing cost on file. A missing or zero field hands the valuation to Amazon's internal estimator, which is typically lower than your true landed cost.
2. The number must be defensible. Keep supplier invoices, payment records, and purchase orders that support the figure. If Amazon questions a cost, an invoice trail settles it; a spreadsheet of intentions does not.
3. Re-verify when pricing changes. Supplier raises prices, you renegotiate, freight shifts your landed cost — the Seller Central field should follow. Stale low figures underpay you on every future claim.

It is a short task for most catalogs, and the claims you file afterwards are valued on it. While you're in cost-data mode, run your real numbers through our FBA calculator — with reimbursements pegged to cost and fees rising, several sellers discover that marginal SKUs no longer clear a sensible profit floor.

What auto-reimbursement catches — and what it quietly misses

Amazon now auto-reimburses many lost and damaged inventory cases without a claim. This is genuinely useful, and it is also the most dangerous development in the policy — because it convinces sellers the problem is solved.

Automation handles the clean, single-event cases: a unit scanned lost in a fulfillment center, an obvious warehouse damage event. What it does not reliably catch:

• Inbound receiving shortfalls — you shipped 500 units, Amazon checked in 480, and no one flagged the 20.
• Returns that never return — a refund was issued, but the unit never re-entered sellable inventory and was never marked lost.
• Disposed or destroyed inventory without proper notice or credit.
• Fee overcharges from wrong dimensions or weights — not "lost inventory" at all, so automation never looks.
• Removal order losses — units that vanish between the FC and your door.
• Multi-leg discrepancies where a unit moves between fulfillment centers and the paper trail breaks.

These complex cases are exactly where the meaningful money sits, and they only surface when someone reconciles inbound records, settlement reports, returns data, and inventory ledgers against each other. That is manual work — automation-assisted, but human-judged.

The monthly audit routine that protects your recoveries

Here is a routine you can run in-house at the start of each month.

Step 1: Pull the core reports

From Seller Central, export the Inventory Ledger, the FBA customer returns report, the reimbursements report, and your settlement reports. Set each date range from the claim windows above, not from a fixed look-back. Some open only after a waiting period, so the returns report has to reach back to the far end of the customer-returns window, not stop where it opens.

Step 2: Reconcile inbound shipments

Compare units shipped against units received for every shipment closed in the period. Investigate every shortfall — carton-level packing lists and proof of delivery are your evidence.

Step 3: Match refunds to returned inventory

Pick the refunds to check by their returns window, not by how recent they are: a customer-returns claim can be filed between 60 and 120 days after the customer refund or replacement date, per Amazon's announcement. For each refund inside that window, confirm the unit either re-entered sellable stock, was marked unsellable, or was reimbursed. A refund with none of the three is a candidate claim.

Step 4: Sweep the inventory ledger for unexplained adjustments

Filter for lost, damaged, and disposed events, then cross-check each against the reimbursements report. Auto-reimbursement should have covered the simple ones — your job is the residue it skipped.

Step 5: Spot-check fees

Verify the dimensions and weight Amazon has on file for your top SKUs against reality. A single wrong measurement compounds across every unit shipped, and fee corrections follow their own claim path automation ignores.

Step 6: File fast, document fully

For every confirmed discrepancy, file with the shipment IDs, invoices, and photos attached up front. Under the tightened 2026 review standards, a complete first submission resolves faster and denies less often than a thin one you plan to reinforce on appeal.

Notice that steps 1 through 5 are reconciliation and step 6 is filing. They are separable. Leviathan Recon takes steps 2 through 4 off the spreadsheet: upload the reports from step 1 and it rebuilds your unit ledger per FNSKU, which leaves you holding a short list of Take Action rows rather than four reports to cross-reference. Step 5 is still a check you make by hand, and step 6 stays yours: you raise the case in Seller Central.

If even that reads like a part-time job, that is because at real catalog scale it is one. The reconciliation half is the part software can carry; the filing half is yours either way.

The 2026 changes stacking on top

Reimbursement policy is not moving in isolation this year. Three broader shifts raise the stakes:

• FBA prep and labeling services end in the US in 2026. Prep responsibility moves to sellers and their suppliers — and prep errors are a classic source of inbound discrepancies, so expect more receiving disputes, not fewer.
• Fulfillment fees rose again, averaging around $0.08 more per unit. Small per-unit, real at volume.
• DD+7 payouts went live in March 2026. Amazon now holds sale proceeds until seven days after delivery. Slower cash in, thinner reimbursements out — working capital is squeezed from both ends.

We track all of these month by month in our Amazon FBA policy updates tracker if you want the running list.

Where software fits

You can run everything above in a spreadsheet, and for a small catalog you might. The case for software is scale and deadlines: claim windows do not care that you were busy with a product launch, and a cross-reference done by hand is the one that gets skipped in a busy month.

Leviathan Recon does the reconciliation half. You export the reports from Seller Central and upload them; it rebuilds your unit ledger per FNSKU and marks each row Reconciled, Over, Reimbursed, Take Action or No Snapshot, so the month's reconciliation is a list you work through. The case itself you raise in Seller Central. If you want to know what your account shows under the 2026 rules, start the 14-day free trial: no card on file, and your own reports.

The bottom line

The 2026 reimbursement regime pays less per incident, gives you a fraction of the time to claim, and automates just enough to create false confidence. The sellers recovering well right now all do the same three things: accurate cost data on every SKU, a monthly (or faster) reconciliation rhythm, and complete documentation on the first filing. Start with the cost fields this week — it is the cheapest fix with the fastest payback.