Amazon FBA fees UK: fulfilment, storage, peak and low-price FBA explained

Amazon’s FBA fee is often as large as its referral fee, and it varies far more from product to product. Two items at the same price can pay very different fees because one is 100 g heavier or 2 cm thicker. This guide covers the fulfilment and storage detail behind our overview of Amazon selling fees in the UK, which follows a full £20 sale from price to profit.

All rates below are for UK local FBA, excluding VAT, and were checked on Seller Central UK on 1 October 2026. Amazon’s Europe rate card in force is dated 1 July 2026¹³.

FBA fees at a glance

There is no monthly subscription for FBA itself; Amazon describes it as paying only for the services you use¹².

Fulfilment fees by size tier

Amazon sorts every product into a size tier by its packaged dimensions and weight, then charges a flat fee per unit within a weight band. For parcels and most oversize items, the weight used is the greater of the actual unit weight and the dimensional weight. Envelopes, low-price FBA items and special oversize products are charged on unit weight only, as are parcels in clothing, accessories, rucksacks and handbags¹.

The formula is from Amazon’s rate card¹³. Here are the UK fees, outside peak and during the 2026 peak period¹:

Products in a group of selected categories, including clothing, footwear, grocery, pet clothing and food, home linen and mattresses, use their own parcel tiers based on thickness and unit weight: from £2.83 for a small parcel up to 7 cm thick to £3.97 for a large parcel up to 26 cm, for the first 100 g, plus £0.02 to £0.03 for each further 100 g outside peak¹¹³.

Heavy items also carry a minimum referral fee when sold through FBA: £20 above 23 kg and £25 for special oversize¹¹. That belongs in the same sum.

Low-price FBA: the £20 rule

Since 5 January 2026, products get low-price FBA rates automatically when they meet all of these conditions³:

• priced at or below £20 including VAT, or £10 in Beauty, Health and Personal Care; Business, Industrial and Scientific Supplies; Office Products; Grocery and Gourmet; Books; Amazon Device Accessories; and Kitchen;
• no larger than 35 × 25 × 12 cm;
• no heavier than 400 g, by unit weight.

Low-price rates are from Amazon’s low-price FBA page³ and standard rates from its 2026 fee tables¹. Delivery speed is the same as standard FBA, and low-price FBA items are exempt from the peak fee¹³. Amazon put the average saving for the newly eligible products at £0.40 per unit¹².

The rule creates two cliffs worth checking on every small product: the price ceiling and the 400 g limit. Our seller fees guide shows a £20.00 product keeping £1.15 more per sale than the same product at £20.99.

The 2026 peak fulfilment fee

From 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027, Amazon charges higher fulfilment fees on FBA orders delivered to UK buyers. The fee applies by delivery date, regardless of when the stock arrived or when the order was placed¹. On 15 January 2027 fees return to the 2026 non-peak rates.

All figures are from Amazon’s 2026 peak fee page¹. Light and standard envelopes, oversize and low-price FBA items are not affected. Amazon says the 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge applies to the peak fees as well². The increase is about 4% on a parcel, so it rarely changes a decision on its own, but it lands in the same weeks as peak storage rates and Black Friday discounts. Build all three into your Q4 margin before you set deal prices.

Monthly storage, peak storage and the utilisation surcharge

Storage is charged every month on the daily average volume your stock occupies, in cubic feet⁴. Rates have applied since 1 February 2026:

All rates are per cubic foot per month⁴. To work out a unit’s volume, multiply its packaged dimensions in centimetres and divide by 28,316.84. A 25 × 20 × 6 cm box is 0.106 cubic feet, so it costs about 8p a month to store from January to September and 16p from October to December.

On top of that, Professional sellers whose first FBA shipment was more than a year ago can pay a storage utilisation surcharge if their storage utilisation ratio is above 22 weeks. The ratio is average daily inventory volume divided by average daily shipped volume over 13 weeks, divided by seven; in effect, weeks of cover. The surcharge runs from £0.42 per cubic foot for standard-size stock between 22 and 28 weeks to £2.29 above 52 weeks (£0.12 to £0.81 for oversize), on stock aged over 30 days. Clothing, eyewear, shoes, bags and dangerous goods are excluded, and so are sellers with less than 25 cubic feet of daily volume⁴.

Storage overage fees, once charged for exceeding capacity limits, have not applied in the UK since 1 July 2024¹⁰. How to plan stock so storage stays a small number, including capacity limits and reorder points, is in our inventory management playbook.

The aged inventory surcharge

Stock that has been in a fulfilment centre for 241 days or more pays a monthly surcharge on top of storage, assessed on the 15th of each month⁵:

Clothing, footwear, rucksacks and handbags, luggage, jewellery and watches are exempt from the first band. Submitting a removal or disposal request before the assessment date avoids the charge, and Amazon asks that removed ASINs are not restocked for eight weeks⁵.

Inbound placement, prep, removal and disposal

Inbound. In the UK, box-level inventory placement uses the box contents you provide to split eligible shipments across fulfilment centres, and “there is no additional cost to you"⁸. Seller Central UK has no page for the inbound placement service fee Amazon charges in the US, so a UK seller does not pay it as of 1 October 2026. Mistakes still cost money: a missing Amazon barcode triggers an unplanned service fee of £0.15 per unit, rising to £0.30 at elevated or critical coaching levels⁹. Amazon’s new-seller incentives include £80 off shipments sent with the Amazon Partnered Carrier Programme¹². Our guides to sending stock to FBA and FBA prep cover how to get shipments right first time.

Removal and disposal. Since 1 May 2026, removal fees are charged as each unit is removed⁶:

Oversize removals start at £2.13 to return and £3.06 to dispose of a unit up to 500 g⁶. Cross-border removals between the UK and the EU are no longer possible.

Returns processing fees

For clothing, accessories and footwear with free returns, Amazon charges a returns processing fee on every returned unit, equal to 50% of its fulfilment fee. For all other categories, the fee applies only to returns above a category threshold, measured over the month of shipment and the two months after⁷. UK thresholds include 7.14% for Home and Kitchen, 7.26% for Everything else, 6.17% for Toys and Games, 5.65% for Beauty, Health and Personal Care and 12.70% for Pet Supplies. The fee per returned unit above the threshold is £2.22 for a small parcel up to 150 g and £2.27 up to 400 g⁷.

As an illustration: ship 1,000 units of an Everything else product in a month, and the threshold is about 73 returns. If 100 come back, roughly 27 pay the fee; at £2.27 each that is about £61. Products shipping fewer than 25 units a month are exempt, and so are backpacks and handbags⁷.

What FBA costs per unit: six example products

The bars below show the UK fulfilment fee for six illustrative products, outside peak and before the 1.5% surcharge.

Fees are from Amazon’s 2026 and low-price FBA tables¹³, storage from the monthly storage rates⁴; the products, prices and packaging are illustrative. The pet bed weighs 1.5 kg but is charged on 10.8 kg of dimensional weight: £3.49 plus £0.22 for each kilogram above 760 g, on our reading of the table. Check any oversize product in Amazon’s Revenue Calculator, which includes the surcharge and peak rates².

Which SKUs FBA makes unprofitable

FBA works well for small, fast-selling products that earn Prime delivery. It works against you in five situations we see again and again in the accounts we manage.

1. Cheap products just over a threshold. A £12 product weighing 500 g misses low-price FBA by 100 g and pays £3.04 instead of £2.70. With a 15% referral fee, the surcharge and the 2% digital services fee, Amazon takes about £4.99 of the £10 the seller keeps after VAT: half the ex-VAT price before the product is paid for.
2. Light but bulky products. Dimensional weight charges for air. The pet bed above pays on 10.8 kg, and it costs about 13 times as much as the kitchen scale to store.
3. Slow sellers. Held for eight months, the pet bed pays about £8.40 to £10.20 in storage, depending on how many of those months fall between October and December. From 241 days the aged surcharge adds £2.25 a month in its first band⁴⁵.
4. High-return lines. Clothing pays half the fulfilment fee again on every return, and other categories pay on returns above the threshold⁷, before counting units that come back unsellable.
5. Heavy, low-price products. Above 23 kg the minimum referral fee of £20 can exceed the margin on its own¹¹.

The options are covered in FBA vs FBM and Seller Fulfilled Prime, and what FBA is and when it pays explains the trade-off. For new products, the FBA New Selection programme gives eligible new-to-FBA ASINs free monthly storage, removals and returns processing for a limited period¹², which lowers the cost of finding out. To see fees, advertising and profit per product together, use our FBA fee and profit calculator or the Profit X-Ray.