Guide

What Amazon FBA actually costs in the UK

Ask what FBA costs and you usually get one number back: the referral fee. That is the headline, not the bill. The money leaves in six or seven separate places, several of them long after the sale, and most of them are invisible at the moment you set your price.

This page groups the whole stack so you can see it at once, then shows how to turn it into a per-unit number for your own products. Every figure quoted is one Amazon publishes, with the source and the date it was checked. Where Amazon does not publish a public figure, this page says so and describes the fee instead of guessing at it.

Figures checked against Amazon's published schedules on 4 August 2026.

The cost of being on the platform

Before a single unit sells there is a cost to having a shopfront at all. It is the smallest line in the stack and the easiest to compare, which is probably why it is the one most often quoted.

• Professional selling plan

  £25 per month, excluding VAT Published by Amazon UK — Selling on Amazon fee schedule and pricing , checked 4 August 2026.

  Flat, whether you sell one unit or a thousand. A quiet January costs exactly what a good December costs, so it is a fixed overhead rather than a cost of sale.

• Individual plan, per item

  £0.75 per unit sold, excluding VAT Published by Amazon UK — Selling on Amazon fee schedule and pricing , checked 4 August 2026.

  The alternative to the subscription, and only sensible at low volume. It also comes with restrictions the Professional plan does not have, which is a cost that never shows up on an invoice.

The cost of every sale

The referral fee is a percentage taken on each order, and it applies whether Amazon fulfils the order or you do. It is category-specific, so two sellers turning over the same amount can hand over very different sums.

• Referral fee

  Most categories fall between 8% and 15%; published rates run from 5% to 45% Published by Amazon UK — Selling on Amazon fee schedule and pricing , checked 4 August 2026.

  The rate depends on your category, and in several categories on the item's price as well, with different percentages either side of a price breakpoint. This is the line everyone knows about, and the one people mean when they say Amazon takes a cut.

• Minimum referral fee

  £0.25 per item in most categories Published by Amazon UK — Selling on Amazon fee schedule and pricing , checked 4 August 2026.

  On cheap items the percentage stops mattering and the floor takes over. It is the quiet reason small, low-priced products so often fail to work: at a low enough price the minimum is a far larger share of the sale than the headline percentage suggests.

• The 2026 referral reductions

  Clothing and accessories cut from 8% to 5% for items up to £15, and from 15% to 10% between £15 and £20, effective 15 December 2025. Home products cut from 15% to 8% up to £20; pet clothing and food from 15% to 5% up to £10; grocery, gourmet, vitamins, minerals and supplements from 8% to 5% up to £10 — all effective 5 January 2026 Published by Amazon — Update to European referral and Fulfilment by Amazon fees for 2026 , checked 4 August 2026.

  Worth stating plainly, because the story is not only ever that fees go up: Amazon cut referral fees across several high-volume categories for 2026. Whether you felt any of it depends entirely on what you sell and what you charge for it.

The cost of getting the parcel there

The fulfilment fee is what most people mean by 'the FBA fee'. It is charged per unit and set by category, size and weight rather than by price, which is why a cheap bulky product can be a worse proposition than an expensive small one.

• Fulfilment fee per unit

  No single rate to quote — it is set by category, then size band, then weight, and published as rate cards.

  There is no single figure to quote here, and anyone who gives you one is rounding. It is a grid: your category first, then the size band, then the weight bracket — and the size band you land in depends on your packaging as much as your product. Amazon publishes the rate cards and a revenue calculator; that is where your number comes from. The practical consequence is that packaging is a pricing decision — a few millimetres over a band boundary is a permanent cost on every unit you ever ship.

• The 2026 fulfilment reductions

  FBA fulfilment fees for parcels reduced by an average of £0.26 per unit, effective 15 December 2025 Published by Amazon — Update to European referral and Fulfilment by Amazon fees for 2026 , checked 4 August 2026.

  An average across a wide range of products, so yours may have moved by more, by less, or not at all. Averages are the right way to announce a change and the wrong way to plan a margin.

• Low-Price FBA

  Products priced at or below £20 became eligible from 5 January 2026, lowering fees for newly eligible products by an average of £0.40 per unit Published by Amazon UK — Low-Price FBA rates , checked 4 August 2026.

  The threshold was £10 before this. If you sell anywhere in the £10 to £20 range, this is the change most likely to have touched your margin, and it is worth confirming your listings actually moved onto the lower rates rather than assuming they did.

• Fuel and logistics surcharge

  1.5% on FBA fulfilment fees in the UK from 17 April 2026, and on Multi-Channel Fulfilment from 2 May 2026 Published by Amazon Seller Central — Fuel and logistics-related surcharge: FBA and MCF , checked 4 August 2026.

  Calculated on the fulfilment fee, not on the sale price, so it is small in absolute terms. Its real significance is that it is a line which did not exist when you last built your spreadsheet, and it will not be the last one.

The cost of holding stock

Storage is where a healthy-looking product quietly turns into a loss. It is charged on volume rather than value, it roughly doubles for the last quarter of the year, and it keeps charging for exactly as long as the stock sits there.

• Monthly storage, January to September

  £0.76 per cubic foot per month for standard-size, non-dangerous goods Published by Amazon UK — Selling on Amazon fee schedule and pricing , checked 4 August 2026.

  Charged on the space you occupy, not on what the stock is worth. A slow seller pays the same rate per cubic foot as a fast one, which means your worst products are subsidised by your best ones unless you look at this per line.

• Monthly storage, October to December

  £1.51 per cubic foot per month for the same standard-size goods Published by Amazon UK — Selling on Amazon fee schedule and pricing , checked 4 August 2026.

  Almost exactly double, and it lands in the months you have shipped extra stock in for peak. Both directions of that decision are expensive: send too little and you miss the season, send too much and you pay the higher rate on everything that does not move.

• Aged inventory surcharge and long-term storage

  No figure published on Amazon's public pages — described rather than estimated.

  Amazon names both of these as charges that apply to stock which has been in the network a long time, but does not put the rates on its public pricing page, so there is no figure here to quote — the current schedule in Seller Central is the only correct source for yours. The mechanism is the part worth internalising: unsold stock does not sit still on your books. It gets progressively more expensive to keep, which turns a slow line into an actively worsening one.

The cost of staying visible

This one appears on no fee schedule anywhere, because it is not a fee. It is an auction. It behaves like a cost of trading regardless.

• Advertising

  No fixed rate exists to publish — keyword pricing is dynamic, moving daily and through the day.

  It is not hidden, though. You bid on keywords, you are charged per click, and you can see what a click costs you before you commit to it — though what it costs today is not what it cost last week, or what it will cost this afternoon. What you cannot see is whether it will work. The clicks are billed whether or not they turn into sales, and the gap between those two numbers is where the margin goes — which is why the figure that matters is cost per unit sold, not cost per click. The honest version from having been part of a business that sold this way — advertising is the line that ate the margin. Organic placement is not something you can count on holding, and once the other sellers in your category are bidding, stopping carries a cost of its own. It is also never finished: the ads need reviewing and reworking constantly to keep doing their job, so the cost is your time as well as the bid — and that time has to come out of running the rest of the business. Of every number in your spreadsheet, this is the one most likely to be wrong, and it is wrong in the same direction every time.

The cost when things go wrong

The last group is the one that rarely makes it into a pricing model, because it is about the units that never complete a clean sale. It is also where the shape of the relationship becomes clearest.

• Returns processing

  No figure published on Amazon's public pages — described rather than estimated.

  In categories with free customer returns, a returned unit carries a processing charge on top of the fulfilment fee you already paid on the way out. Amazon publishes which categories and at what rate in its fee schedule; the number that actually matters to you is your own return rate multiplied by it, which is a figure only your reports have.

• Removal orders

  No figure published on Amazon's public pages — described rather than estimated.

  Getting your own stock back out of the network is charged per unit. It is worth knowing the mechanism before you need it, because the moment you need it is rarely a calm one.

• Disposal

  No figure published on Amazon's public pages — described rather than estimated.

  If stock has to go and you have not arranged a removal, disposal is charged per unit as well. This is the line worth understanding properly, because it is the one that reveals the arrangement: stock you own, sitting in a warehouse you do not control, can end up costing you money to be destroyed. In a business I was part of, a rule change deactivated a listing that was carrying real revenue. Once a listing is down, stock that was an asset one day is a storage bill the next, and neither the rule nor its timing was ours to decide.

What this page cannot tell you

• Your category's exact referral percentage and its price breakpoints. There are dozens of categories, several have different rates either side of a price threshold, and the current schedule is the only correct source.
• Your fulfilment fee. It comes from a category, size and weight grid, and the difference between two bands can be larger than your margin.
• The current aged inventory, long-term storage, returns processing and removal rates. Amazon names these charges publicly but publishes the numbers in the fee schedule inside Seller Central rather than on its public pricing page, so this page describes them rather than quoting a figure it cannot stand behind.
• Whether FBA is worth it for you. For plenty of products it plainly is: the per-unit fulfilment cost is genuinely hard to beat on your own, and the placement that comes with it is real. The aim here is to make the cost side legible, so that 'worth it' becomes a calculation rather than an assumption.

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