Amazon’s 2026 FBA changes in the UK pull in two directions. Parcel fulfilment fees and several referral fees went down, while storage, return-to-seller and liquidation fees went up, and a 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge arrived in April. Whether you come out ahead depends on your category, your price point, your product size and how long stock sits in the warehouse. This guide sets out what changed, when, and how to measure the effect on each SKU.
TL;DR
- Fulfilment fees for parcels fell by an average of £0.26 in the UK from 15 December 2025, and referral fees dropped in several categories from 15 December 2025 and 5 January 2026.
- Monthly storage, return-to-seller and liquidation fees rose selectively, and a 1.5% surcharge on fulfilment fees has applied since 17 April 2026.
- Amazon’s own headline figure is an average net saving per unit across Europe, but your result depends on category, price and size, so calculate it per SKU.
- Peak-season fulfilment fees apply each winter (excluding apparel), and products with lithium batteries or hazmat classification carry an extra per-unit fee.
- Check your numbers with Amazon’s calculator and your own profit data before you change prices or ad budgets.
Table of Contents
What changed in 2026, in one place
Amazon described the 2026 update as one of its largest-ever fee reductions, lowering fees by an average of £0.15 per unit sold across its European stores, according to the Amazon UK pricing page. That is an average across millions of units. It tells you very little about a single listing.
Here is the timeline of the main changes that affect UK sellers:
| Date | Change | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| 15 December 2025 | FBA fulfilment fees for parcels reduced by an average of £0.26 in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain | Down |
| 15 December 2025 | Clothing and Accessories referral fee cut from 8% to 5% (items up to £15) and from 15% to 10% (£15 to £20) | Down |
| 5 January 2026 | Category referral fee reductions and wider Low-Price FBA eligibility | Down |
| 2026 | Selective increases to monthly storage, return-to-seller and liquidation fees | Up |
| 17 April 2026 | 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on FBA fulfilment fees | Up |
The dates for the December and January changes come from Amazon’s European fee announcement. The surcharge date is from Amazon’s seller notice on the fuel and logistics surcharge.
Which FBA fees UK sellers pay
Before looking at the changes, it helps to keep the full cost stack in view. According to Amazon UK’s pricing documentation, UK FBA sellers pay fulfilment fees, storage fees, referral fees and optional service fees. Each behaves differently:
- Referral fee: a percentage of the item price, set by category. Most sit between 8% and 15%.
- Fulfilment fee: a per-unit charge for picking, packing and shipping, based on size and weight tiers.
- Storage fees: charged monthly on the space your stock occupies, with higher charges for slow-moving inventory.
- Optional services: returns handling, disposal, labelling, bagging, bubble wrap, taping and opaque bagging, all listed in the European rate card.
Fulfilment fees depend on size and weight, and many sellers overpay because they have the wrong dimensions on file or misjudge the volumetric calculation. Our guide to the dimensional weight rule behind UK FBA fees explains how that works.
The fee reductions: who gains most
Lower parcel fulfilment fees
The average £0.26 reduction on parcels applies to the UK store from 15 December 2025, as stated on the Amazon UK pricing page. It builds on parcel reductions introduced in 2025. Because it is an average, small light items in the lower size tiers may see a different change from a bulkier parcel.
To make that concrete, here is an illustration with invented numbers. If you ship 10,000 parcels a year and your fee falls by exactly the average of £0.26, that is £2,600 a year before any other change. If your actual saving is £0.10 on a particular tier, the same volume gives £1,000. The point is that the average is only a starting point for your estimate.
Referral fee cuts by category
Amazon cut referral fees in several categories. According to its announcement, sellers in Clothing and Accessories, Home Products, Grocery, Vitamins and Pet Clothing and Food saw reductions. The figures published on the pricing page include:
- Clothing and Accessories: 8% down to 5% up to £15, and 15% down to 10% from £15 to £20.
- Home Products (new category): 15% down to 8% for items up to £20.
- Pet Clothing and Food: 15% down to 5% for items up to £10.
These cuts concentrate on lower-priced items. A £12 clothing item previously paid £0.96 in referral fees at 8% and now pays £0.60 at 5%, a difference of £0.36 per unit (simple arithmetic on the published rates). On a low-margin product, that can matter more than the fulfilment change.
Wider Low-Price FBA eligibility
From 5 January 2026, Low-Price FBA eligibility was expanded so that products priced at or below £20 could qualify, per the Amazon announcement. If you previously kept cheaper products on merchant fulfilment because FBA did not pay, it is worth re-running those numbers.
The increases: where costs crept up
Storage, return-to-seller and liquidation
Amazon applied selective increases to monthly storage fees, return-to-seller and liquidation fees. Taking everything together, including updated fulfilment fees for the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland and Poland, Amazon reported an average net increase of £0.02 per unit for those adjustments. Check the details in your own account rather than relying on that average.
The practical lesson is that slow stock is now a bigger risk than before. A cheaper fulfilment fee does not help a product that sits for months and then gets liquidated.
The 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge
From 17 April 2026, a 1.5% surcharge applies to FBA fulfilment fees in the UK and nine other European stores, according to Amazon’s notice. Two details matter:
- It is calculated on your fulfilment fee, not on the selling price.
- Amazon says it averages about £0.05 per unit for EU FBA, varying with item size and dimensions.
Amazon explained that elevated fuel and logistics costs had raised its operating costs and that it uses temporary surcharges to recover part of them. Because it is temporary, build it into your costs as a separate line so you can see its effect and remove it if Amazon withdraws it.
An example with invented figures: a fulfilment fee of £3.00 attracts a surcharge of £0.045. A fee of £6.00 attracts £0.09. The charge is small per unit, but it applies to every unit and compounds with other changes.
Peak-season fees and hazmat charges
The July 2026 rate card lists festive peak fulfilment fees for FBA, excluding apparel, from 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027. Expect a similar autumn-to-January window each year, and confirm the exact dates on the current rate card. The same card lists an extra £0.10 per unit for products containing lithium batteries or classified as dangerous goods.
If you run promotions around big shopping events, those added costs come on top of discounting. Planning the demand side matters as much as the fees, and marketing services built around Prime Day are one way to plan reviews, content and promotion around peak periods. Whatever you choose, check that the extra sales cover the seasonal fulfilment fee and any returns.
Who is most affected
The changes are not evenly spread, so group your catalogue before you do any maths:
- Low-priced items in Clothing, Home, Grocery, Vitamins or Pet: likely the biggest beneficiaries, from referral cuts and Low-Price FBA.
- Parcel-sized products in standard tiers: likely to see lower fulfilment fees, partly offset by the surcharge.
- Slow-moving stock: exposed to higher storage, return-to-seller and liquidation costs.
- Batteries and hazmat products: carry an extra £0.10 per unit.
- Apparel in winter: excluded from the peak fulfilment fee, but still subject to returns costs.
How to work out your own impact
Amazon says its Revenue Calculator, Profit Analytics dashboard and Fee and Economics Preview report were updated with the 2026 rates and the April surcharge. Those are a sensible first step. A repeatable process looks like this:
- Export your SKU list with price, category, size tier, weight and unit cost.
- Run each SKU through the calculator and note the fulfilment, referral and storage lines.
- Add the surcharge (1.5% of the fulfilment fee) if your tool does not already include it.
- Add the costs outside the calculator: advertising, returns, VAT treatment, inbound shipping and prep.
- Compare with last year’s actual settlement data to see what really changed.
- Flag SKUs where margin moved by more than a point or two and decide whether to reprice, reduce stock or drop them.
Step 4 is where most estimates go wrong, because fees are only part of the cost of selling. Our walkthrough on working out what each SKU really earns covers the full cost stack. VAT also affects what you keep per sale, as described in our guide to Amazon UK VAT for sellers.
Check that you are charged correctly
Fee errors happen when dimensions or categories are wrong. Compare the fee Amazon charged on a recent order with the published rate card and the calculator’s figure for the same product. If they differ, check the item dimensions and weight in your catalogue first, then contact Seller Support with the order and the rate card line.
What to do about it
Reprice with the full picture
Do not change prices because of an average. Reprice only SKUs where your calculated margin has moved enough to matter. Where fees dropped, you may choose to hold your price and take the extra margin, or use it to fund advertising.
Tighten inventory
With storage and liquidation costs rising selectively, ordering accuracy matters more. Know how much stock you can send in and how fast it sells. Our guides on FBA restock limits and headroom and on automating replenishment without letting fees eat margin show how to keep stock lean without running out.
Check that ads still pay
A small fee change can turn a break-even advertising campaign negative, especially on low-priced items. Review spend weekly and allow time for attribution, as we describe in our guide on auditing ads weekly to reduce wasted spend. If your ads and organic sales overlap heavily, our piece on checking 30 days of TACoS for ad cannibalisation helps you spot it.
Our perspective
We see the same pattern each time Amazon updates its rate card: sellers read the headline average, assume it applies to them, and carry on. In practice the average hides winners and losers within a single catalogue. A seller with 300 SKUs may have 40 that gained meaningfully, 200 that barely moved and 60 that quietly lost margin because of storage, returns or ad spend.
That is why we built Osellpa around profit at SKU level, connected to Amazon’s API, rather than around spreadsheets that someone has to update by hand after every fee announcement. When fees change, you should be able to see the effect on each product without rebuilding a model. Our advice is simple. Treat every fee change as a prompt to check your numbers once, find the handful of SKUs that matter, act on those, and leave the rest alone.
— Harry
See your fee impact without the spreadsheet
If you want fees, ad spend and costs combined into one profit figure per product, Osellpa’s plans start with Launch at £10 per month or £96 per year. Scale is £20 per month or £192 per year, and Advanced is £40 per month or £80 less than… no: £384 per year at the annual rate. Pricing is published on our pricing page, and you can see the full toolkit on the Osellpa homepage.
FAQ
What is the Amazon FBA fee?
It is the charge Amazon makes to store, pick, pack and ship your products, and to handle returns. In the UK, sellers pay fulfilment fees, storage fees, referral fees as a percentage of sales, and optional service fees. All of them are listed on the Amazon UK pricing page and the current rate card.
Did UK FBA fees go up or down in 2026?
Both. Parcel fulfilment fees and several referral fees went down, while monthly storage, return-to-seller and liquidation fees rose selectively. A 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on fulfilment fees has applied since 17 April 2026, so your net result depends on your product mix.
Is FBA still profitable in 2026?
For many UK sellers it can be, but it depends on product size, weight, price, storage time and advertising cost. Calculate profit per SKU including fulfilment, storage, referral and other fees, plus ads, returns and VAT. Products that sell quickly at a healthy margin usually cope well, while slow-moving or very low-margin items are the ones that suffer.
How do I find out what the changes cost me?
Run your SKUs through Amazon’s Revenue Calculator and Fee and Economics Preview report, then compare with your real settlement data. Add the 1.5% surcharge if it is not already included. Focus on SKUs where your margin moved by a meaningful amount.
