What does Amazon take from an FBA sale?

On a £24.99 Home Products item sold on amazon.co.uk and fulfilled by Amazon, in a 30 × 20 × 10 cm box weighing 900 g and sitting in a fulfilment centre for two off-peak months, Amazon takes £7.33 and leaves you £17.66 before your own costs. That is a 15% referral fee (£3.75), a £3.26 fulfilment fee and £0.32 of storage — and only the first of those three has anything to do with the price. The other two are decided by the size and weight of the box and by how long the unit sits still, which is why two products at the same price can hand Amazon very different amounts. Every figure on this page was read from Amazon’s own published pages on 25 September 2026 and applies to the amazon.co.uk store. Amazon changes these rates, and publishes separate festive-peak rates; check the current fee schedule and run your own product through Amazon’s revenue calculator before you price anything.

The four charges on an FBA sale, and where the numbers come from

Sell one unit through Fulfilment by Amazon on amazon.co.uk and four separate charges can land on it. Amazon publishes them in two places: the Pricing page on sell.amazon.co.uk, which carries the selling plan prices, the referral fee table and the monthly storage rates; and the Europe FBA Rate Card, a PDF that Amazon links from that same page, which carries the per-unit fulfilment fees, the size tier definitions, the storage surcharges and the optional service fees. Both are linked at the foot of this page. The rate card read for this guide is marked Effective as of 1st July 2026.

On top of those four sit the charges that only appear when something goes wrong or slowly: the aged inventory surcharge on stock over 241 days, the storage utilisation surcharge, the returns processing fee on high-return-rate products, the refund administration fee, and removal, disposal or liquidation fees on stock you pull back out. Those are the fees that catch FBA sellers out, and they get a section each below.

Two warnings before any of the arithmetic. First, these rates move. The rate card names a festive-peak fulfilment fee period running 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027, storage rates step up for October to December, and the rate card carries a note that from 17 April 2026 a 1.5% fuel and logistics-related surcharge applies to fulfilment fees across FBA in the UK and other stores. Nothing below applies that surcharge, because the amount that actually lands on a given ASIN is something Amazon shows you in its own revenue calculator. Use it. Second, everything here is stated as Amazon states it. Amazon publishes its selling plan prices exclusive of VAT and assesses VAT in addition where applicable; what that means for your own numbers depends on your VAT position, and that is a question for your accountant, not for a web page.

If you also sell on a marketplace with a flat fee structure, the contrast is instructive — see what Etsy takes, where the entire deduction is a percentage plus a small fixed amount and nothing depends on the size of the parcel.

The referral fee: a percentage of your offer price, set by category

The referral fee is the one every seller finds, because it is a single percentage in a public table. Amazon states it calculates referral fees on the offer price you provide. For the UK store, a per-item minimum of £0.25 applies across all fee categories, and media items carry a closing fee of £0.50 each — Books, Music, DVD and Video, Video Games including accessories and consoles, and Software.

A sample of the UK table, taken from Amazon’s pricing page and cross-checked against the rate card:

Read the wording in that table carefully, because two different mechanisms are hiding in it and they behave nothing alike.

Portion-based tiers are gentle. Furniture, Jewellery, Watches, Automotive and the accessory categories charge the higher rate only on the slice of the price below the threshold and a lower rate on the slice above. Crossing the threshold costs you nothing extra on the pounds you were already charging. A £180 Furniture item pays 15% on the first £175 and 10% on the remaining £5.

Whole-price bands are a cliff. Home Products, Baby Products, Beauty, Clothing, Pet Clothing and Food, and Vitamins state the rate for items priced at or up to a threshold and a different rate for items priced above it. The higher rate then applies to the entire price, not to the excess. That is a genuine trap, and it is worth seeing in numbers. Take a Home Products item:

Charging 50p more leaves you 97p less on every unit. To get back to the £18.39 you were keeping at £19.99, you now have to reach £21.64 — because £21.64 less 15% is £18.39. Every seller in a banded category has a price they should not cross without a plan to jump clear of it, and the pricing page tells you where it is.

The referral fee is also the one charge the fulfilment decision does not touch. It is the same percentage whether Amazon ships the unit or you post it yourself, which means the whole FBA-versus-self-fulfilment argument is really an argument about the other two charges.

The fulfilment fee: the box decides, not the price

This is the fee that surprises people. The FBA fulfilment fee is a flat amount per unit that covers picking, packing, carriage and customer service, and it is set entirely by the physical product. A £9 item and a £90 item in identical boxes pay identical fulfilment fees. Amazon describes it as a flat fee per unit based on both dimensions and unit weight.

Two things determine which figure in the table you land on: the size tier, which is a set of dimension limits, and the shipping weight. And shipping weight is not simply what the parcel weighs. Amazon states that envelopes, Special oversize products and products fulfilled via Low-Price FBA are charged on the actual unit weight, while parcel and oversize tiers, excluding Special oversize, are charged on the greater of the unit weight or the dimensional weight:

Dimensional weight in kg = (length × width × height in cm) ÷ 5,000

Shipping weight for a parcel = the greater of unit weight and dimensional weight

That single line is responsible for most of the nasty surprises in an FBA cost model. A light product in a generous box is billed as though it were heavy. Take a 900 g item in a 30 × 20 × 10 cm box: 6,000 cubic centimetres divided by 5,000 gives a dimensional weight of 1.2 kg, so the unit is billed at 1.2 kg and not at 900 g. Shave the box down to 30 × 20 × 7 cm and the dimensional weight falls to 0.84 kg, and the billed weight drops back to the actual 900 g. Nothing about the product changed.

Here is the UK column of Amazon’s standard FBA fulfilment fee table, with the tier definitions exactly as the rate card states them. Weight rows are upper bounds for the band.

Notice what that table does and does not do. Across the whole standard parcel tier, from 150 g to 11.9 kg, the fee moves from £2.94 to £3.58 — a spread of 64p across nearly twelve kilos. But stepping out of the parcel tiers into oversize moves it to £4.35 or £5.67 before a single extra kilo is counted. The tier boundary costs far more than the weight. If a product sits a centimetre over a dimension limit, the cheapest engineering job in your business is usually the box.

There is also a separate, cheaper schedule. Amazon’s Low-Price FBA rates apply to fast-moving, small, light products priced at £20 or less including VAT in most categories, and £10 or less including VAT in Beauty, Health and Personal Care; Business, Industrial and Scientific Supplies; Office Products; Grocery and Gourmet; Books; Amazon Device Accessories; and Kitchen. On that schedule a 20 g light envelope is £1.46 against £1.83 on standard FBA, and a 460 g standard envelope is £1.87 against £2.16. Amazon also states that Low-Price FBA does not use dimensional weight at all — actual unit weight only. For a sub-£20 seller that combination is worth more than it looks.

Worked example: a £24.99 Home Products unit on amazon.co.uk

One unit. Category Home Products. Packaged at 30 × 20 × 10 cm, unit weight 900 g, so a dimensional weight of 1.2 kg and a billed shipping weight of 1.2 kg, landing in the standard parcel 1.4 kg band. It arrives at the fulfilment centre and sells two months later, both months between January and September. The unit cost you £7.20 and £0.45 a unit to get into Amazon’s network — those last two are your figures, not Amazon’s.

Amazon’s share of that order is 29.3%, and your gross margin is 40.1% of the offer price. If you are on the Professional plan at £25 a month and you ship 300 units in the month, that is another £0.08 a unit, taking gross profit to £9.93. Put £7.65 and £17.66 into the margin calculator and you get the same 40.1% back, plus the price a different target margin would require.

Storage: rent on a shelf, charged by the cubic foot

The fulfilment fee is charged once, when the unit ships. The storage fee is charged every single month the unit does not. Amazon charges monthly storage fees for all units held in a fulfilment centre based on calendar month and your daily average volume, measured in cubic feet for the United Kingdom, using the unit’s size when properly packaged and ready for shipping. Amazon also states it is entitled to take its own measurement, and that where its measurement conflicts with the seller’s, its measurement governs.

The UK rates, per cubic foot per month:

Look at the second row. For most sellers, the rate almost doubles from October to December — £0.76 becomes £1.51. That is the quarter when everybody ships in stock for the Christmas run, and it is also the quarter when unsold stock costs the most to hold. The two facts are related, and the second one is what people forget.

Converting a box into cubic feet is the only piece of arithmetic here that is not Amazon’s. One cubic foot is 30.48 cm cubed, which is 28,316.85 cubic centimetres:

Cubic feet per unit = (length × width × height in cm) ÷ 28,316.85

There is a second storage charge on top of the monthly one. The storage utilisation surcharge is based on your storage utilisation ratio, which Amazon calculates as your average daily inventory volume stored divided by your average daily shipped volume over the past 13 weeks. It is worked out separately for standard-size and oversize, excluding clothing, eyewear, shoes and bags. The UK rates, added to the base monthly fee:

Amazon states this surcharge does not apply to new sellers, to sellers with Individual selling accounts, or to sellers with less than 25 cubic feet of daily volume, and defines a new seller as one who sent a first shipment to a fulfilment centre less than 52 weeks ago. Read the top band literally: holding more than a year of cover in standard-size stock adds £2.29 per cubic foot per month on top of the £0.76 or £1.51 base. That is a fee whose only cause is ordering too much.

Worked example: the same unit, sold fast and sold slowly

A Toys and Games item on amazon.co.uk at £29.99, packaged at 35 × 25 × 15 cm and weighing 1.6 kg. Dimensional weight is 13,125 divided by 5,000, or 2.625 kg, which beats the unit weight, so it is billed at 2.625 kg in the standard parcel 2.9 kg band: £3.49. Its volume is 13,125 divided by 28,316.85, or 0.4635 cubic feet, so it costs £0.3523 a month to store off-peak and £0.6999 a month in October to December. It cost £9.50 to make.

Column A sells the unit two months after it arrives, both months off-peak. Column B arrives on 1 February and sells on 30 November, which is ten calendar months, of which October and November are charged at the peak rate, and which takes the unit past 241 days in storage.

Same product, same price, same customer, same referral fee, same fulfilment fee. Amazon’s share goes from 29.0% of the order to 47.4%, and your gross profit falls by £5.53, which is 47% of it. Nothing went wrong. Nobody discounted, nobody returned anything, no cost overran. The unit simply sat still for eight extra months, two of them at the peak rate, and then crossed an age threshold. The aged inventory line is unpacked in the next section.

This is why FBA punishes over-ordering so specifically. In your own warehouse, slow stock costs you space you have already paid for. In Amazon’s, it bills you monthly, at a rate that rises with the calendar and again with age. The break-even calculator answers the companion question — how many units a month you need to shift to cover the fixed costs sitting behind that stock in the first place.

Aged inventory, removals and returns: the bill for stock that did not sell

Three separate charges sit at the end of an FBA unit’s life, and between them they decide whether a slow product is merely disappointing or actually loss-making.

The aged inventory surcharge

Amazon applies an aged inventory surcharge to units stored beyond 241 days, in addition to the regular storage fee. Its stated purpose is that overstocked inventory limits the space available for fast-selling products. The UK rates, per cubic foot per month:

Amazon states that the 241 to 270 band excludes items listed under Clothing and Accessories, Footwear, Rucksacks and Handbags, Luggage, Jewellery and Watches.

Follow the steps. At 241 days a standard-size unit is paying £0.76 or £1.51 base plus £1.18. Thirty days later the surcharge alone is £3.14 — more than four times the off-peak base rate. By the time the unit is a year old it is £5.71 per cubic foot per month, or 20p a unit if that is greater. That is the arithmetic behind the £2.01 in the worked example above: the 0.4635 cubic foot unit picks up roughly one monthly assessment in the 241 to 270 band at 0.4635 × £1.18 = £0.55, and one in the 271 to 300 band at 0.4635 × £3.14 = £1.46. Which band a given month lands in depends on the unit’s age on the assessment date, so treat the split as indicative and the rates as exact.

Run that forward for a full year on a pallet of slow stock and the surcharge can exceed what the goods cost. The surcharge is not a penalty you can appeal; it is a price for shelf space, and the only two ways out of it are selling the unit or removing it.

Removals, disposal and liquidation

Amazon offers three exits for stock you want out: return-to-seller, which ships it back to you; disposal; and liquidation, where Amazon sells the stock on and returns a recovery value. All three are charged per unit, on a table organised by size tier and weight band, with separate standard-size and oversize schedules and separate local and cross-border rates. The rate card holds that table and it is too granular to reproduce faithfully here, so take your own figures from it directly rather than from any third-party summary.

Two things about liquidation are worth stating because Amazon states them plainly. Amazon applies two separate charges to each liquidated item: a 15% liquidations referral fee based on the item’s gross recovery value, and a liquidation processing fee based on the item’s size and weight. And Amazon notes that cross-border returns from the UK are currently disabled.

The practical point is that there is no free exit. A unit that will not sell costs you storage if it stays, an aged surcharge if it stays long enough, and a per-unit fee whichever way it leaves. The cheapest moment to deal with slow stock is always the earliest one, and the number that tells you when is your rate of sale against your months of cover — not the stock value on your balance sheet.

Returns

Two charges sit on the return side, and they work differently.

The refund administration fee applies when you refund a customer who has already been charged. Amazon states this as the lesser of £5.00 or 20% of the applicable referral fee. On the £24.99 Home Products order above, 20% of the £3.75 referral fee is £0.75, so that is what applies. Amazon also states that reimbursement credits and referral fee credits are issued for all or part of the value of a refund, and that FBA fees, restocking fees and returns processing fees may be charged depending on the item.

The returns processing fee is narrower and much larger. Amazon applies it to high-return-rate products in all categories excluding clothing, accessories and footwear, and only to products whose return rate exceeds a threshold specific to each category. The return rate is measured as the percentage of a product’s shipped units in a given month that are returned over that month and the following two calendar months, and the fee is charged on each returned unit above the category threshold. UK figures from the rate card, for comparison against the fulfilment fees above:

For clothing and shoes, where the general returns processing fee does not apply, Amazon states that the returns processing fee is equal to 50% of the total fulfilment fee for a given product, applied to units fulfilled from local inventory and across Europe through the European Fulfilment Network.

Put that against the Toys and Games example. That unit’s fulfilment fee is £3.49. If the product is over its category return-rate threshold, a returned unit carries a further £2.83 — so a sale that is later returned has cost roughly £6.32 in fulfilment and returns handling, plus the referral fee treatment of the refund, plus the storage the unit resumes accruing when it goes back on the shelf. A product with a high return rate does not simply earn less; it can consume the margin of the units that did not come back. If you sell a category with a structurally high return rate, this is the fee to model before you model anything else.

The subscription, and FBA versus packing it yourself

The selling plan is the one charge that has nothing to do with any individual order. Amazon prices it two ways on the UK store: the Individual plan at £0.75 excluding VAT per item sold, and the Professional plan at £25 excluding VAT per month. Both sit on top of the referral fee, the fulfilment fee and everything else.

The crossover is simple arithmetic:

£25.00 ÷ £0.75 = 33.33 items, so the Professional plan is cheaper from the 34th item sold in a month

Check it at the edges. Thirty-three items on the Individual plan cost £24.75, which is less than £25. Thirty-four cost £25.50, which is more. Below about 34 sales a month the per-item plan wins on price alone; above it, the monthly plan does, and the gap widens fast — at 300 units a month the Individual plan would cost £225 against £25. Note too that Amazon states the storage utilisation surcharge does not apply to Individual selling accounts, which is a real, if narrow, consideration for a very small seller.

The trade, stated honestly

FBA is not automatically the right answer and it is not automatically the wrong one. It is a purchase, and the question is whether what you buy is worth what it costs. Strip the decision down and only two of the four charges actually move:

So the real comparison is: £3.26 per unit plus £0.16 a month of storage, against a jiffy bag, a label, a carrier rate, someone’s time to pick and pack it, and the shelf it sat on. For a small, light, fast-moving item in the envelope tiers, where the published UK fee runs from £1.83 to £2.16, Amazon’s price is difficult to beat on labour alone. For a bulky item in the oversize tiers that turns over twice a year, the same arithmetic runs the other way, and hard.

Three things belong in the comparison that are not on either fee schedule. Fulfilling yourself means customer service, returns handling and delivery performance become your problem, and Amazon measures all three. FBA units are handled inside Amazon’s own network, which is what Prime eligibility runs on, and that has a demand-side effect no cost table can price. And your own fulfilment cost is not free just because it does not arrive as an invoice — an hour of packing is an hour, whoever pays for it. Amazon publishes a revenue calculator specifically for this comparison, and it describes it as a tool for comparing revenue estimates across fulfilment channels. That is the tool to settle it with, using your product.

Working the price backwards

Most sellers price forwards, then discover the fees. It runs just as easily the other way. The referral fee is a percentage; the fulfilment fee, the storage and your unit cost are all fixed amounts per unit. So:

Price = (what you want to keep + fulfilment fee + storage + unit cost) ÷ (1 − referral fee %)

Take the Toys and Games unit: a 15% referral fee, a £3.49 fulfilment fee, £0.70 of storage over two months and a £9.50 unit cost. To keep £10.00 a unit:

(£10.00 + £3.49 + £0.70 + £9.50) ÷ (1 − 0.15) = £23.69 ÷ 0.85 = £27.87

Check it: £27.87 less a 15% referral fee of £4.18 is £23.69, less £3.49, less £0.70, less £9.50, leaves exactly £10.00. Now re-run it with the slow-moving storage of £4.22 and the £2.01 aged surcharge in place of the £0.70, and the price you need becomes £33.79. That single comparison is the most useful thing on this page: your required price is a function of your rate of sale, and any FBA price set without an assumption about how fast the unit moves is a guess wearing a decimal point.

What this page does not tell you

Four things here genuinely depend on your own numbers and no fee schedule can supply them. Your actual billed fulfilment fee depends on Amazon’s own measurement of your packaged unit, which Amazon states governs where it conflicts with yours. Whether the 1.5% fuel and logistics-related surcharge and the festive-peak rates land on your ASIN is something to confirm in Amazon’s revenue calculator, not to assume from a table. Whether VAT is charged on your Amazon fees, and how it flows through your accounts, depends on your VAT position and is a question for your accountant. And whether a given price is viable depends on your unit cost, your advertising, your return rate and your rate of sale — the fee arithmetic tells you what lands in your account, not whether the product was worth stocking.

Arithmetic and general information only — not financial, tax, legal or investment advice. Your own figures, and your own accountant, decide what any of this means for you.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Amazon take from an FBA sale?

On a 24.99 pound Home Products item on amazon.co.uk, in a 30 by 20 by 10 cm box weighing 900 g and stored for two off-peak months, Amazon takes 7.33 pounds and leaves 17.66 pounds before your own costs: a 15% referral fee of 3.75 pounds, a 3.26 pound FBA fulfilment fee for the standard parcel 1.4 kg band, and 32p of storage. That is 29.3% of the order. The referral fee follows the price, but the fulfilment fee and the storage follow the box and the calendar, so the same percentage will not hold for a different product. Amazon changes these rates, so check the current fee schedule.

What is the Amazon referral fee and how does it vary by category?

Amazon calculates the referral fee on the offer price you provide, and the rate is set by product category. Most sit between 8% and 15%. On the UK store, Computers, Consumer Electronics, Full-Size Appliances and Tyres are 7%, Tools and Home Improvement is 13%, Toys and Games, Kitchen, Office Products and Sports and Outdoors are 15%, and Amazon Device Accessories is 45%. A per-item minimum of 25p applies across all fee categories, and media items carry a 50p closing fee. Some categories are banded by price: Home Products is 8% at or up to 20 pounds and 15% above it, and that higher rate applies to the whole price, not just the excess.

Why is my FBA fulfilment fee higher than the weight of my product suggests?

Because for parcel and oversize tiers, excluding Special oversize, Amazon charges on the greater of the unit weight and the dimensional weight. Dimensional weight in kilograms is length times width times height in centimetres divided by 5,000. A 900 g item in a 30 by 20 by 10 cm box has a dimensional weight of 1.2 kg, so it is billed at 1.2 kg. Envelopes, Special oversize and Low-Price FBA units are charged on actual unit weight only. Tier boundaries matter more than weight: the UK standard parcel fee runs from 2.94 pounds at 150 g to 3.58 pounds at 11.9 kg, but stepping into small oversize starts at 3.49 pounds and standard oversize large at 5.67 pounds.

How much does Amazon charge to store FBA inventory in the UK?

Monthly storage is charged per cubic foot on your daily average volume. For standard-size products outside clothing and footwear the UK rate is 76p per cubic foot from January to September and 1.51 pounds from October to December. Clothing, Eyewear, Footwear, Rucksacks and Handbags are 62p and 82p, and oversize is 55p and 87p. A storage utilisation surcharge can be added on top, from 42p to 2.29 pounds per cubic foot per month for standard size, based on your inventory volume divided by your shipped volume over the past 13 weeks. Amazon states that surcharge does not apply to new sellers, Individual accounts, or sellers with less than 25 cubic feet of daily volume.

What happens to FBA stock that does not sell?

It starts costing more. Amazon applies an aged inventory surcharge to units stored beyond 241 days, in addition to the normal storage fee: in the UK that is 1.18 pounds per cubic foot per month at 241 to 270 days, 3.14 pounds at 271 to 300, 3.26 pounds at 301 to 330, 3.41 pounds at 331 to 365, and then 5.71 pounds per cubic foot or 20p per unit, whichever is greater, from 365 days. Getting the stock out is also charged: return-to-seller, disposal and liquidation all carry per-unit fees set by size tier and weight, and liquidated items additionally carry a 15% liquidations referral fee on gross recovery value plus a liquidation processing fee. There is no free exit, so the cheapest time to act on slow stock is the earliest.

Sources

• Amazon UK Seller Pricing and Plans (selling plan prices, referral fee table, monthly storage fees, refund administration fee) — checked 2026-09-25
• Amazon Europe FBA Rate Card, effective 1 July 2026 (fulfilment fees and size tiers, dimensional weight, storage and aged inventory surcharges, returns processing, removals and liquidation, referral fees and minimums) — checked 2026-09-25
• Amazon FBA Revenue Calculator (per-ASIN fee preview and fulfilment channel comparison, published by Amazon) — checked 2026-09-25

Other guides

• How much does Etsy take from a sale?
• How to build a cash flow forecast
• Agency utilisation rate: the formula, and the denominator that decides it