Amazon selling fees UK: every fee, and what a £20 sale really leaves you

Most sellers can quote their referral fee. Far fewer can say what a single sale leaves them once VAT, fulfilment, storage, returns and advertising have all been taken. This guide does both. It lists every fee a UK seller pays, with the rate and the date it took effect, and then follows one £20 sale all the way to profit. For the fulfilment and storage tables in full, see our companion guide to Amazon FBA fees in the UK.

Every fee was checked on Seller Central UK and sell.amazon.co.uk on 1 October 2026. Fees are shown excluding VAT unless we say otherwise; the price thresholds that set them are VAT-inclusive.

Every Amazon UK seller fee on one page

The rest of this guide takes them in turn, then adds them up.

Individual or Professional: choosing a selling plan

The Individual plan has no subscription and charges £0.75 for each item sold. The Professional plan costs £25 a month excluding VAT, however many units you sell¹. That makes Professional cheaper from about 34 sales a month, and Amazon’s own guidance suggests Individual only if you sell fewer than 35 items a month².

For a brand, the features decide it. Amazon’s plan comparison lists on-site advertising, bulk listing tools, feeds and reports, API integration, restricted categories, promotions and multiple users as Professional features². If you plan to advertise, and almost every brand does, that settles it. The £25 fee applies when your active listings are only in Amazon’s European stores, including the UK; a different fee can apply if merged accounts list elsewhere¹.

Referral fees by category, and the 2026 low-price bands

The referral fee is Amazon’s commission on each sale. It is a percentage of the total sales price, which Amazon defines as the offer price plus shipping, gift wrap and other charges, “and any taxes and customs duties"³. In other words, it is charged on the VAT-inclusive total. One FAQ on Amazon’s marketing site says referral fees exclude taxes²; the Seller Central methodology page is the one that governs.

Most categories pay 15% with a £0.25 minimum. The categories brands most often ask us about:

All rates are from the UK fee schedule¹, which also lists the remaining categories.

Read the wording carefully, because there are two kinds of band. “Up to £20 / above £20” is a whole-price band: one rate applies to the entire price. A Home Products item at £20.00 pays 8% (£1.60); at £20.01 it pays 15% on everything (£3.00). “The portion above £175” is a tiered band, like income tax: a £300 sofa pays 15% on £175 and 10% on £125, so £38.75.

Two more rules catch heavier products. FBA products over 23 kg pay a minimum referral fee of £20, and special oversize products (over 31.5 kg, longer than 175 cm or with a girth over 360 cm) pay at least £25¹. Amazon, not you, decides a product’s fee category: in Seller Central, open Manage all inventory, click Calculate revenue under the estimated fees and select the information icon next to the referral fee¹.

The 2% digital services fee

Amazon adds a digital services fee to its fees to reflect the UK’s 2% digital services tax. For sales in the UK store it is 2% of your referral fee, closing fee and FBA fulfilment fee¹⁴. A 15% referral fee therefore costs 15.3% in practice. It is small per unit, but it applies to almost every fee line, so leave it out of a model and every margin is slightly too high.

If you sell into Europe from a UK business, note the change from 20 March 2026: UK-established sellers now pay 3% on Selling on Amazon and FBA fees for sales in the France, Italy and Spain stores⁴.

Closing fees for media, and the fees most brands never meet

Media sellers pay a closing fee on top of the referral fee. Books priced below £5 pay £0.50 per item and books at £5 or more pay £1.00; music, DVD, video, video games (including accessories and consoles) and software pay £0.50¹. Books, music, video and software also have no £0.25 minimum referral fee.

The high-volume listing fee only applies above 2 million active non-media SKUs in a month, at £0.0003 per SKU over the limit¹. If you are anywhere near it, you already know.

FBA fees in summary

If Amazon stores and ships your stock, Fulfilment by Amazon adds three kinds of fee. Our FBA fees guide has every size tier; here is what most UK brands pay.

• Fulfilment, per unit sold. Set by size tier and weight. Non-peak UK rates run from £1.83 for a light envelope to £3.58 for a standard parcel up to 11.9 kg; oversize starts at £3.49 plus a charge per kilogram⁵.
• Low-price FBA. Products priced at or below £20 including VAT, up to 400 g and 35 × 25 × 12 cm, get cheaper rates automatically: £1.46 to £2.70 per unit. The ceiling is £10 for Beauty, Health and Personal Care, Business and Industrial Supplies, Office Products, Grocery, Books, Amazon Device Accessories and Kitchen⁶.
• Surcharges. A 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on fulfilment fees since 17 April 2026, which also applies to peak fees⁷. From 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027, a peak fee adds £0.07 to £0.13 per unit to UK parcels and large envelopes, but not to oversize or low-price FBA items⁵.
• Storage. £0.76 per cubic foot a month from January to September and £1.51 from October to December for most standard-size products, with a utilisation surcharge for established sellers holding more than 22 weeks of stock relative to sales⁸. Stock held 241 days or more also pays an aged inventory surcharge⁹. How to stay clear of both is in our inventory management playbook.

Whether FBA is right for a product at all is a separate decision; see FBA vs FBM and Seller Fulfilled Prime.

Refunds and returns: what Amazon keeps

When you refund an order you have already been paid for, Amazon returns the referral fee minus a refund administration fee: the lesser of £5.00 or 20% of the referral fee¹. On our £20 Home Products example, the referral fee is £1.60, so Amazon keeps £0.32 and refunds £1.28.

FBA adds a returns processing fee in two cases. For clothing and footwear with free returns, it is 50% of the unit’s fulfilment fee on every return. For all other categories, it applies only to returned units above a category threshold, such as 7.14% for Home and Kitchen or 7.26% for Everything else in the UK, and products shipping fewer than 25 units a month are exempt¹⁰. The bigger cost of a return is often the item itself, if it comes back unsellable.

Advertising and VAT: two price bases

Advertising is optional, charged per click at a price set by auction², and for most brands it is the largest cost after the product itself. It also creates the most common error in Amazon margin models, because the two halves of Amazon report on different bases:

• Referral fees are calculated on the price including VAT³.
• Amazon Ads reports sales without VAT: “Attributed sales don’t include tax. Inclusive tax such as VAT is subtracted from sales totals.“¹¹

At the UK standard rate of 20%¹², a £20.00 sale is reported by Amazon Ads as £16.67. Work out your margin as a share of the ex-VAT price and compare it with ACoS on that basis; our guide to break-even ACoS shows how, and what a good TACoS is covers the account-level view.

What a £20 sale really leaves you

Here is one sale, followed all the way through. The fees and VAT follow Amazon’s and HMRC’s published rules as they stood on 1 October 2026; the product, its cost and its advertising are illustrative, so replace them with your own.

The sale leaves £5.14, or 30.8% of the £16.67 that remains once VAT is removed. Amazon’s own fees, from referral to storage, come to £4.56, which is 22.8% of what the shopper paid. Before advertising this product makes £6.81, so its break-even ACoS is 40.9%.

The 99p that costs £1.15

Now price the same product at £20.99. It crosses two thresholds at once: the Home Products referral fee jumps from 8% to 15% of the whole price¹, and the product loses low-price FBA, so it pays the standard small parcel rate of £3.00 instead of £2.70⁵⁶.

The higher price earns 99p more from the shopper and leaves £1.15 less. The peak column applies from 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027, when the standard small parcel fee rises to £3.11⁵; low-price FBA items are exempt from it.

Same £20, different category

The category matters as much as the price. At exactly £20.00, with every other cost unchanged:

Same price, same product cost, and a £1.74 difference in profit per unit. In the accounts we manage, threshold pricing and pack weight are among the first things we check, because they cost nothing to change. At 500 units a month, the £1.15 gap in the table above is worth £575 a month.

How to check the fees on your own products

Amazon’s Revenue Calculator, its Profit Analytics dashboard and the Fee and Economics Preview reports all include the fuel surcharge and peak rates, and the FBA Re-measurement and Reimbursement tool checks whether a wrongly measured product qualifies for a refund of fees⁷. Our FBA fee and profit calculator runs the same sum with your cost of goods, returns and advertising included, and the Profit X-Ray does it for the whole account.

Fees are the part of Amazon profit you can predict. Once they are modelled correctly, product by product, the conversations that matter get much easier: which products to price up, which to repackage, which deserve more advertising, and which should leave FBA or the catalogue altogether.