Amazon Long-Term Storage Fees, Explained With the Actual Math

What the fee actually is, and when it hits

The long-term storage fee (LTSF) is an extra monthly charge Amazon adds on top of your regular storage fee once a unit has been sitting in a fulfillment center for more than 365 days. It's triggered by how long the unit has been there, not by whether the SKU is currently selling. A product can be moving fine this month and still get hit, because the units currently in the count arrived over a year ago and never left.

Amazon runs the check monthly. It takes a snapshot of units in storage around the 15th, calculates the charge against that snapshot, and posts it to the account a few days later. It's assessed per SKU, per fulfillment center — so if the same slow-moving item is split across two FCs, both pools of aged units get charged separately.

It sits alongside, not instead of, your standard monthly storage fee and the aged inventory surcharge that starts earlier than the 365-day mark. Sellers often assume LTSF is the only aging charge on the account; it's the last one, not the only one.

How the calculation works, and a worked example

The mechanic is simple even though the numbers change: Amazon charges whichever is greater of (a) a per-cubic-foot rate applied to the total volume you have in long-term storage, or (b) a flat per-unit minimum multiplied by your unit count. Both figures live in the Fee Schedule inside Seller Central, and Amazon revises them — sometimes with the annual size-tier updates, sometimes off-cycle. We're not printing a specific dollar figure here, because any number we typed today has a real chance of being stale by the time you read it. Pull the current schedule before you run your own math.

Here's the mechanic on illustrative numbers so the shape is clear. Say a SKU has 4,000 units aged past 365 days, and each unit's carton is 0.3 cubic feet — total volume of 1,200 cubic feet. Multiply that volume by the current per-cubic-foot rate. Separately, multiply 4,000 units by the current per-unit minimum. Amazon bills whichever total is larger. For small, low-density items, the per-unit minimum usually wins. For anything bulky, the cubic-foot rate usually wins. Once you know which side of that comparison your SKU sits on, you know exactly which number to watch when Amazon updates rates.

Aged inventory surcharge vs. long-term storage fee

These are two different charges on the same aging problem, and mixing them up is one of the more common support-ticket mistakes we see. The aged inventory surcharge is a smaller add-on that starts well before the 365-day cliff, layered on top of your normal monthly storage fee as units cross earlier age windows. The long-term storage fee is the separate, larger charge that starts at day 365 and is calculated with the cubic-foot-or-per-unit-minimum method above, not as a simple add-on percentage.

The table below lays out the stages without quoting a specific rate for either, since both are published by Amazon and both move.

What to do when the number is bad news

If a unit has already posted a fee, you can't get it un-charged just because you weren't watching — the real fix window is the months before day 365, once the aged inventory surcharge has already told you something is building. At that point you've got three real options: remove it (pay the removal fee, ship it back or dispose of it), liquidate it through Amazon's program for partial recovery, or discount/promote it hard enough to clear before the next monthly cutoff.

Run the actual numbers before picking one — removal cost plus freight or disposal against another 6 to 12 months of storage and surcharge, versus what liquidation would actually pay out on that SKU, versus what a price drop would recover at closer to real margin. There's no default right answer; it depends on unit economics, not on which option sounds most decisive.

If the fee itself looks off — wrong dimensions, wrong size tier, a unit count that doesn't match your own records — that's a dispute, not a storage decision, and it's worth checking against your actual product measurements before assuming Amazon's number is correct. Full Circle has managed more than $500M in revenue across 100+ brands, and the storage line is one of the first places worth checking on any account, because nobody logs into Seller Central daily just to watch a snapshot date.

The mistake most people make — including one we've made

The most common mistake: assuming removal is automatically cheaper than paying the fee, without actually running the math. Removal fees plus freight back or disposal can cost more than a few extra months of LTSF, especially on cheap, small items where the per-unit minimum — not the cubic-foot rate — is doing all the work.

The second: waiting for a sale that isn't coming. The SKU aged past 365 days because it wasn't selling. If the last six months of velocity didn't move it, the next six probably won't either, and every month of waiting adds another month of fees to the eventual decision.

One we've made ourselves: defaulting to liquidation on every low-velocity SKU just to stop the fee clock, when for a handful of accounts a straight, timed price drop before the monthly cutoff actually recovered more per unit than liquidation would have paid. Worth running both numbers every time, rather than picking the fix that feels most final.