Amazon Q4 2026 Inbound Deadlines: The Six Dates That Decide Your Quarter

By Archit Mathur · Published 2026-09-01 · Last updated 2026-09-02

There are six dates between early September and the end of October that determine whether your inventory is sellable during the only ten weeks of the year that matter. Amazon has published all six and will not send you a reminder as any of them approaches. This page was written on 1 September 2026; the first cutoff falls the next day.

The six dates

Amazon splits the cutoffs by fulfilment path and, within FBA, by which shipment-splitting option you chose when you created the shipment. That second distinction is the one sellers miss, and it is worth a week of runway.

Accepting Amazon-optimized shipment splits buys you an extra week on both events, because Amazon is routing your units to the fulfilment centres that suit its network rather than the ones you would have picked. Choosing minimal splits costs you that week — and it costs you twice, because minimal splits are also the option that incurs the FBA inbound placement service fee (opens in a new tab). Splitting across more destinations is what avoids it.

It is a three-way choice rather than a binary, which the deadline table flattens. Amazon-optimized splits carry no placement fee. Partial splits, sending to three or four destinations, carry a reduced one. Minimal splits — fewest destinations — carry the highest. What minimal splits save you is freight: fewer destinations, fewer legs, a simpler booking. That is the real trade, and it is worth making knowingly in September rather than discovering in November.

The fee that starts on 15 October

Holiday peak fulfilment fees apply from 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027 (opens in a new tab) for FBA, Remote Fulfillment with FBA, Multi-Channel Fulfillment and Buy with Prime. Amazon states the dates are the same as last year and the per-unit increases are the same as last year.

The thing to notice is the end date. Peak fulfilment fees do not stop when the shopping stops. They run three weeks into January, which covers the entire post-Christmas returns and clearance period — a stretch when your revenue per unit is at its lowest and your fulfilment cost per unit is at its highest.

Two different windows both called peak

This trips people up in spreadsheets every year, and several otherwise careful fee guides blur it. Peak fulfilment fees run 15 October to 14 January, which Amazon publishes and we cite above. Peak monthly storage rates run on a different and shorter calendar, covering the last quarter of the year. Amazon's storage rate card is behind a sign-in, so read the current months and rates from it rather than from any article, including this one — the point here is only that the two windows are not the same window.

In practice: a unit sitting in the network through November pays the peak storage rate for November whether or not it sells, while a unit that ships to a customer on 20 December pays a peak fulfilment fee at a point when peak storage has already run its course. Inventory you send in September to hit the Prime Big Deal Days cutoff and then fail to sell carries peak storage across the whole of the last quarter before you have the option of doing anything about it — which is the cost of an over-optimistic September forecast, and it is incurred months before you find out the forecast was wrong.

The surcharge stacks on top

The 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge introduced on 17 April 2026 is calculated on your fulfilment fees (opens in a new tab), not on the sale price of your items. Amazon has published no end date for it and no removal trigger, and states plainly that it applies on top of holiday peak fulfilment fees.

So the Q4 unit economics question is not "what is the peak fee" but "what is 3.5% of the peak fee, on top of the peak fee." Amazon puts the surcharge at an average of $0.17 per unit for US FBA, noting that it varies with item size and dimensions. Read that as an average across items and size tiers, which is what Amazon says it is — not a figure for your unit, and not a figure for a particular season.

Since the surcharge is charged on the fulfilment fee, a higher peak fulfilment fee produces a higher surcharge on the same unit. That is arithmetic and it holds. What does not follow is that your Q4 surcharge must exceed $0.17: the $0.17 average spans every size tier, so a small-standard unit at peak can still sit below it. Whether your own number goes above or below the average depends on your size tier, not on the season.

Amazon does publish one number for the peak step itself, and it is worth having. Holiday peak fulfilment fees carry the same per-unit increase over non-peak rates as last year, averaging $0.32 per unit (opens in a new tab), and the same announcement states directly that the 3.5% surcharge applies on top of holiday peak fulfilment fees. So the stack is not an inference: Amazon says both halves of it in one paragraph.

Why AWD gets an earlier date and a better deal

Amazon Warehousing and Distribution takes the earliest cutoff of the three paths on both events — 2 September and 14 October — which reads like a penalty and is not. Amazon states that no additional AWD fees apply during peak, in contrast to FBA peak fulfilment fees, and that AWD auto-replenished inventory is not subject to FBA capacity limits during peak.

That is the actual trade being offered: commit your bulk inventory earlier, and in exchange the two things most likely to hurt you in Q4 — peak fees and a capacity limit that tightens exactly when you want to restock — stop applying to it. Whether that suits you depends on how confident you are in your forecast, because inventory in AWD is inventory you have already bought.

Deals: both windows are still open, and one discount closes on 5 September

Amazon's holiday-peak announcement (opens in a new tab) puts deal submissions as opening on 8 July, with the Prime Big Deal Days window closing on 8 September and the Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday window running to 20 October. As at 1 September, both are open.

Deal fees themselves are unchanged from Prime Day: $100 upfront per promotion plus a variable fee of 1.5% of promotional sales, capped at $5,000 (opens in a new tab), for Best Deals, Lightning Deals and Prime Exclusive Price Discounts. Amazon states there are no new eligibility requirements, and that Prime Big Deal Days promotional prices are excluded from the 30-day and 60-day lookback windows, so a deal now does not depress the maximum deal price you can set for Black Friday.

Meltables reopened, in two stages

If you sell anything heat-sensitive, the FBA door reopened on 31 August — but by product type (opens in a new tab), and the vendor coverage flattening this into one date is wrong in a way that costs a month.

Meltable inventory means heat-sensitive products that melt on prolonged exposure to 155 degrees Fahrenheit. The closed window ran from 20 April to 28 September 2026 (opens in a new tab), so the 31 August reopening is genuinely early — by about four weeks, but only for the first group. Chocolate gains a week, not a month. And in both cases there is a fortnight between the date you may ship and the date customers can buy, which is the number that belongs in your plan.

What to do first

Written on 1 September. The AWD cutoff is 2 September — if you have not booked, that one is effectively decided. The live decisions are the 9 and 16 September FBA dates, and they turn on a single question you can answer in an afternoon: for each of your top SKUs, do you have enough sell-through history to justify committing peak-season units now, at peak storage rates from October, against the risk of a stockout during the only weeks where a stockout compounds into lost rank.

Then check your capacity limit before you build shipments rather than after, because Amazon has said explicitly that estimated limits may fall for October and November. A plan that assumes today's allowance is a plan with an unpriced dependency.

Six dates, no reminders

Every date on this page came from a forum announcement. None of them arrives as a push notification counting down to your cutoff, none is tied to your particular SKUs, and none tells you that the units you sent in September are now accruing peak storage. The fee change on 15 October will not announce itself on your account either; it will show up in a settlement report in November, mixed in with everything else that happened that fortnight.

That is the ordinary condition of selling here. The dates are public, the consequences are private, and the gap between the two is where a quarter gets lost.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. 01
   Your Q4 Inventory Deadlines Are Here: Key Dates You Can't Miss (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Forums
2. 02
   Holiday 2026: Same fees, same eligibility, earlier deadlines (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Forums
3. 03
   Send meltable inventory to FBA starting August 31, 2026 (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Forums
4. 04
   Request to remove meltable FBA inventory by April 20, 2026 (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Forums
5. 05
   FBA inbound placement service fee (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Central
6. 06
   Fuel and logistics-related surcharge: FBA, MCF, and BWP in US and CA (opens in a new tab) — Amazon Seller Forums