The FBA Rate Card, Explained: What Each Line Actually Costs You

What an FBA Rate Card Actually Is

A rate card is the table Amazon publishes showing what it charges per unit to pick, pack, ship, store, and eventually dispose of or return your inventory. It's organized by size tier, weight band, and — since 2026 — price band. The published fulfillment fee tables do not include every surcharge that applies to a given unit; some of those layer on separately and change mid-year.

The version that matters is the one in your own account: Reports > Fulfillment > Fee Preview. Amazon updates that report as rates change and it reflects your actual catalog, not a generic table. Any rate card published on a blog, PDF, or third-party tool — including the tables further down this page — is a snapshot taken on a specific date. In 2026, Amazon made changes on January 15, March 1, and April 17. A rate card printed in February was already wrong by April.

How the 2026 Rate Card Is Structured

The core structure hasn't changed: fulfillment fees are set by size tier (small standard, large standard, small bulky, large bulky, extra-large) and within each tier, by weight band. What's new for 2026 is a second dimension — three price bands (under $10, $10 to $50, over $50) — so the same weight now maps to three different fees depending on what the item sells for.

Here's a slice of the small standard, non-peak table, effective January 15, 2026, before the fuel and logistics surcharge:

• 2+ to 4 oz: $2.49 (under $10) / $3.42 ($10–$50) / $3.68 (over $50)
• 8+ to 10 oz: $2.77 / $3.68 / $3.94
• 14+ to 16 oz: $2.95 / $3.96 / $4.22

None of those figures include the 3.5% fuel and logistics-related surcharge that started April 17, 2026, on every FBA fulfillment fee in the US and Canada. To estimate the post-April fee, multiply the published number by 1.035. That's a structural fact worth remembering even after the specific rate changes again: the base table and the surcharge are always published separately.

A Worked Example: What the Rate Card Actually Costs on One SKU

Take a large standard item, 1.25 to 1.5 lb, priced at $14.99 — the $10–$50 band. The published non-peak fee is $5.42. After the April surcharge: $5.42 × 1.035 = $5.61. That's $0.19 more per unit. At 10,000 units a month, that's $1,900 a month, or roughly $22,800 a year — money that didn't show up anywhere except the fulfillment fee line, because the surcharge doesn't appear in the base table at all.

Now the more common leak: dimensional weight. If that same item is recorded in the catalog at 1.75 to 2 lb instead of its actual 1.5 to 1.75 lb, it pays $5.82 instead of $5.57 in the same price band — a $0.25 per-unit gap that has nothing to do with any 2026 change and everything to do with a stale or incorrect catalog record. Across the $500M-plus in managed revenue we've reviewed across 100+ brands, a mismatched dimensional weight record is one of the single most common findings in a rate card audit. It's a catalog fix, not a fee dispute, and it's usually been sitting there for months before anyone notices.

The Other Lines: Storage, Aged Inventory, and Placement

Fulfillment fee is only one line on the card. Monthly storage fees and aged inventory surcharges sit outside it and scale with how long a unit sits in a warehouse, not how many you sell — a 456-day-plus tier was added starting January 16, 2026, on top of the existing bands. The low-inventory-level fee applies when a standard-size or bulky ASIN's historical supply drops below 28 days, regardless of the fulfillment fee tier it's in.

Inbound placement fees are structural, not per-unit-weight-driven: the way to avoid the fee entirely is shipping in Amazon-optimized splits of five or more identical cartons per item. None of this shows up if you only look at the fulfillment fee table, which is why a rate card read in isolation understates true landed cost per unit.

Common Mistakes When Reading a Rate Card

The most common mistake is treating a static rate card — a PDF, a blog table, this page's example numbers — as current. Amazon reserves the right to adjust rates mid-year and has used that right every year since at least 2023. The second is ignoring the price band boundary: pricing at $9.99 versus $10.00 changes both the referral fee and Low Price FBA eligibility, and sellers frequently don't realize the swing until margin drops for no obvious reason.

We've made this mistake ourselves: building a monthly review off a Fee Preview export that was three weeks old during a rate-change window, because nobody re-pulled it before the meeting. The fix was procedural, not clever — re-pull Fee Preview immediately before any review that touches fee assumptions, not the week before.

What To Do When the Number Looks Wrong

Start with Fee Preview, not the invoice. Confirm the effective date range, confirm the price band the ASIN actually sits in that day, and check whether the 3.5% surcharge or an aged inventory tier is layering on top of the base fee you expected. If the catalog's recorded weight or dimensions don't match the physical product, that's a catalog correction — fix the record and the fee corrects going forward, but it won't retroactively refund past overcharges without a separate reimbursement case.

If the fee genuinely doesn't match what Amazon's own published tier says it should be, that's a Seller Central case with the specific tier math attached, not a guess. And if the number that's actually hurting you is cost-per-click or wasted ad spend rather than a fulfillment or storage line, that's not a rate card problem at all — that's a job for Dr. PPC, not an inventory fix.

Where This Fits If You'd Rather Not Track It By Hand

Dr. Stock is an Amazon inventory and supply chain product built by Fable 5, from Full Circle. It doesn't replace Fee Preview or Seller Central — it watches the lines that actually leak: dimensional weight misclassification, fee errors, aged-inventory and removal-versus-liquidation calls, shipment discrepancies and reimbursement recovery, alongside the reorder timing that causes stockouts in the first place. Purchasing decisions always go to a human, regardless of how much autonomy the client sets elsewhere. There's no published price; it's a demo and a call, with the first 30 days free.