Amazon Account Health in 2026: The Real Thresholds, and Which Ones Do Not Apply to FBA
By Archit Mathur · Published · Last updated
Short answer
Account Health combines an Account Health Rating from 0 to 1,000 with a set of order performance metrics. Green is 200 or above. Order Defect Rate must stay under 1%. Cancellation, Late Dispatch, Valid Tracking and On-Time Delivery apply only to seller-fulfilled orders, which is why FBA accounts usually fail on policy violations rather than on metrics.
Most writing about Amazon account health is written to make you anxious, and then to sell you something. The numbers in it are frequently invented. This is an attempt at the opposite: the thresholds Amazon actually publishes, where each one comes from, and which of them do not apply to you at all.
Four of the six metrics people worry about are seller-fulfilled only. If you are pure FBA, you can stare at them indefinitely and learn nothing about your actual risk.
What the Account Health page actually contains
There are two different things on that page and they fail in different ways.
The Account Health Rating (opens in a new tab) is a colour-coded score from 0 to 1,000 that indicates your account's risk of deactivation for non-compliance with certain Amazon selling policies. Amazon describes it as near real time. It is driven by policy violations and their severity, not by your delivery performance.
The order performance metrics sit alongside it, under customer service performance and delivery performance. These are averages over rolling windows, and each has its own published threshold and its own consequence for breaching it.
| Band | Range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Green | 200 - 1,000 | Meeting performance requirements |
| Yellow | 100 - 199 | At risk of restrictions |
| Red | 99 or lower | Eligible for deactivation |
The order performance metrics and their real thresholds
These come from Amazon's Order Performance programme policy (opens in a new tab). Note the fulfilment column before the threshold column. It is the one that decides whether the row is about you.
| Metric | Threshold | Window | Applies to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Order Defect Rate | Under 1% | 60 days | All orders |
| Cancellation Rate | Under 2.5% | 7 days | Seller-fulfilled only |
| Late Dispatch Rate | Under 4% | 10 or 30 days | Seller-fulfilled only |
| Valid Tracking Rate | Above 95% | 30 days | Seller-fulfilled only |
| On-Time Delivery Rate | 90% minimum in the US | Rolling | Seller-fulfilled only |
Order Defect Rate, the one that applies to everyone
ODR (opens in a new tab) counts orders carrying at least one of three defects, as a percentage of total orders over 60 days. The three are negative feedback, an A-to-z Guarantee claim, and a credit card chargeback. Amazon's policy is that sellers maintain it under 1% in order to sell on Amazon, and that above 1% may result in loss or restriction of selling privileges.
Why low volume is the real risk factor
ODR is a ratio, so the denominator does the damage. At 1,000 orders in the window, nine defects still leaves you compliant. At 60 orders, a single A-to-z claim puts you at 1.67% and over the limit. New and seasonal sellers are not more careless than established ones; they are more exposed to arithmetic.
The seller-fulfilled four
Cancellation Rate covers orders you cancelled before fulfilment, over a 7-day window, and explicitly excludes cancellations the customer initiated themselves. Late Dispatch Rate covers shipping confirmations completed after the expected ship date. Valid Tracking Rate (opens in a new tab) covers shipments carrying a valid tracking number, and its consequence is unusually specific. Falling below 95% in a category may restrict non-FBA selling in that category and affect Premium Shipping eligibility.
On-Time Delivery Rate is the one where the published numbers differ depending on which document you read, and both are real. Amazon's programme policy frames a target above 97% as a recommendation for a good customer experience. Separately, and more consequentially, Amazon requires a minimum 90% OTDR without promise extensions to keep seller-fulfilled products listed on Amazon.com. Treat 90% as the line and 95% or better as where you want to sit.
What changed in February 2026
Effective 28 February 2026 (opens in a new tab), Amazon changed how it applies the existing 90% OTDR requirement. Previously, an OTDR below 90% deactivated all of your seller-fulfilled listings. Under the change, only the listings contributing most to the drop are deactivated.
This is a genuine improvement and it is easy to misread. The requirement did not move. What moved is the blast radius. A shipping problem confined to one product no longer takes the whole seller-fulfilled catalogue offline with it. If you read a guide written before this date, it will tell you the consequence is total. Most of them were.
Violations, which are not metrics
The Account Health Rating responds to policy violations, and violations behave differently from metrics. They are events rather than averages. A metric drifts and gives you time. A violation lands.
The families are familiar enough: intellectual property complaints, product authenticity and condition complaints, product safety and restricted product issues, listing policy violations, and the linked-account provisions under Section 3 of the Business Solutions Agreement. AHR weighs them by severity, and repeat violations of the same policy are treated more harshly than a scattering of unrelated ones.
This is also where sourcing decisions surface. An invoice that will not support an authenticity complaint is a problem you created months earlier, at the point of purchase, and it appears here rather than at the point where you could still have fixed it.
Responding without making it worse
There is a widely repeated claim that appeal success falls sharply with every day you wait, usually with precise-looking percentages attached. Those numbers have no source. Speed does help, but not because a clock is running against you. It helps because evidence is easier to assemble while it is recent, and because an unaddressed violation can accumulate further ones.
What actually distinguishes appeals that work is unglamorous. Read the notification for what it specifically alleges rather than what you assume it means. Address that allegation and not a neighbouring one. Supply documentation that a stranger can verify without knowing your business. And write a plan of action that names a root cause, the corrective action taken, and the preventive change, in that order, because that is the structure the reviewer is looking for.
The most common self-inflicted wound is submitting fast and thin, getting rejected, and then submitting five more times. Repeated weak appeals are worse than one considered appeal submitted a day later.
What you can actually watch, and what you cannot
The Account Health page is genuinely good. It is accurate, it is near real time, and it contains the detail you need. It has exactly one weakness, which is that it is a page. It does not come to you.
Sellers can find the information. What costs them is the interval between something changing and somebody looking, which is measured in days, while the actions that matter - responding to a complaint, correcting a shipping setting, pulling a listing before it accumulates defects - are all much cheaper at hour one than at day four.
A reasonable manual routine exists: check Account Health at a fixed time daily, review the performance notifications tab rather than relying on email, and look at ODR against your order volume rather than in isolation. It works, right up until the week you are travelling, or launching, or ill.
The shape of the problem
Every account deactivation story on the seller forums has the same missing hour in it. The seller knew the rules and found out late. The metric had already crossed, the violation had already been filed, and the information was sitting on a page that nobody had opened since Tuesday.
Amazon publishes all of this clearly and updates it in near real time. Nothing tells you the number moved on the day it moved, which is why the daily check has to be yours to run.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good Account Health Rating?
Green, which Amazon defines as 200 to 1,000 on a scale that runs from 0 to 1,000. Yellow is 100 to 199 and means the account is at risk of restrictions. Red is 99 or lower and means the account is eligible for deactivation. The rating updates in near real time rather than on a reporting cycle.
What is Amazon's Order Defect Rate limit?
Under 1%, measured over a rolling 60-day period. An order counts as defective if it carries negative feedback, an A-to-z Guarantee claim, or a credit card chargeback. Amazon states that an ODR above 1% may result in loss or restriction of selling privileges.
Can Amazon deactivate my account without warning?
Yes for policy violations, which can act immediately and are not gated on a metric trending down. Performance metrics give you more warning in practice, because they move gradually and the Account Health page reflects them in near real time. The warning exists; what does not exist is anything that pushes it to you.
What is the valid tracking rate requirement?
Greater than 95% of shipments carrying a valid tracking number, over a rolling 30-day period, and it applies only to seller-fulfilled orders. Falling below 95% in a product category may restrict your ability to sell non-FBA items in that category and can affect Premium Shipping eligibility.
Does On-Time Delivery Rate apply to FBA orders?
No. OTDR, Cancellation Rate, Late Dispatch Rate and Valid Tracking Rate all apply to seller-fulfilled orders only. A pure FBA seller is measured mainly on Order Defect Rate and on policy compliance, which is why FBA accounts tend to fail on violations rather than on metrics.
How fast can Account Health change?
A policy violation can register immediately, because it is an event rather than an average. Metrics move more slowly, but a low-volume account moves fastest of all: on 60 orders in a 60-day window, a single A-to-z claim is already 1.67% ODR, which is above the limit.
Sources
- 01Account Health Rating program policy (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Central
- 02Order Performance program policy (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Central
- 03Order defect rate (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Central
- 04Valid tracking rate (VTR) (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Central
- 05Update to OTDR listing deactivation process as of February 28, 2026 (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Forums
Get told automatically
Amazon emits a notification when your seller account moves between normal, at-risk and deactivated. Notifcentral subscribes to it and pushes the change to your phone within about a minute, including when the account returns to good standing. This is the alert that reaches you when you are not logged in.
How account health alerts work →notifcentral
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