Amazon FBA Fees Explained: What You Really Pay Per Sale (2026)
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If you sell on Amazon with FBA, the price a customer pays and the money that lands in your account are two very different numbers. Amazon takes its cut in a few separate places, and because those fees are split up, it's easy to underestimate how much of each sale actually leaves your pocket. Here's the honest breakdown for 2026, with real numbers.
The referral fee: Amazon's commission on every sale
The referral fee is Amazon's commission for letting you sell on their marketplace. For most categories it's 15% of the total sale price (including shipping you charge), and it ranges from about 8% to 45% depending on category. Clothing and most home goods sit at 15% or 17%; jewelry can hit 20%. There's also a $0.30 minimum referral fee per item.
This one is unavoidable. It applies whether you use FBA or fulfill orders yourself. On a $25 product at 15%, that's $3.75 gone before you've covered anything else.
The FBA fulfillment fee: picking, packing, and shipping
If you use Fulfillment by Amazon, you pay a per-unit fee for Amazon to store, pick, pack, and ship the item. This is based on size and weight, not price. A small standard-size item starts around $2.43 and a large standard item runs roughly $3.73 to $6.97 before weight surcharges.
A few 2026 changes to know about: starting January 15, 2026, fulfillment fees went up by roughly $0.12 to $0.51 per unit depending on size and price tier. And as of April 17, 2026, there's a 3.5% fuel surcharge added on top of the fulfillment fee. None of these are huge on their own, but they stack.
The fees people forget
Referral and fulfillment are the big two, but they're not the whole story. Monthly storage fees apply to inventory sitting in Amazon's warehouses, and they spike in Q4. Long-term storage (aged inventory) fees punish slow movers. Inbound placement fees can apply when you send stock in. And the Professional selling plan itself is $39.99 a month. If you're advertising, ad spend comes out too, which is why knowing your break-even ROAS matters before you ever launch a campaign.
A worked example: where does $25 go?
Say you sell a standard-size item for $25 and it costs you $6 to make or buy (your COGS).
- Sale price: $25.00
- Referral fee (15%): −$3.75
- FBA fulfillment fee (standard): −$4.50
- COGS: −$6.00
- Left before storage, ads, and the $39.99/mo plan: $10.75
That's a 43% margin on paper, but once you spread storage, returns, and a slice of that monthly fee across your units, the real number is usually lower. This is exactly the kind of math sellers do in their head and get wrong, because the fees live in different places and never show up on one screen.
If you want to see your real number instead of guessing, run it through our free profit calculator first. It takes the price, your cost, and the platform fees and shows you what's actually left. And when you're managing more than a handful of SKUs across Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify, the $39 Vellbrook Profit Dashboard does it for your whole catalog at once, so you can spot the products quietly losing you money. Know your numbers before Amazon's fee schedule decides them for you.