What Is the Amazon Seller Account Fee?

An Amazon seller account fee is the subscription you pay for the selling plan itself, and there are only two of them: the Professional plan at 39.99 USD a month, or the Individual plan at 0.99 USD per item sold. Everything else on your Amazon invoice is a different fee attached to a sale, a shipment or a shelf.

That distinction matters because most people searching for the Amazon seller account fee are trying to work out what selling on Amazon costs, and the subscription is the smallest and most predictable part of it.

What is the Amazon seller account fee on each plan

Amazon compares the two selling plans in its own words. The Individual plan is pay as you go: a 0.99 USD per item fee charged when an item sells, with a basic set of listing and order management tools, and listings created one at a time. The Professional plan is the 39.99 USD monthly subscription, with the tools that matter at volume: managing inventory using feeds, spreadsheets and reports, and order management through order reports and order related feeds.

You can switch between the two at any time, which is the part that makes the maths worth doing properly.

How the 39.99 USD subscription is actually charged

This is where sellers get surprised, so it is worth reading Amazon's own explanation of the charge carefully.

The monthly Professional subscription is allocated to each North American store in which you have active listings on your monthly billing day, and it is limited to 39.99 USD or its equivalent in total. So the trigger is not whether you sold anything. It is whether you had active listings on your billing day, and the cap means a seller live in the United States, Canada and Mexico pays up to 39.99 USD in total rather than three subscriptions.

There is also one exit, and it is narrow. If you were moved onto the Professional plan and want the fee back, Amazon says you are only eligible for that one off refund if you have not used any professional tools or benefits within 90 days. Downgrade first, then ask Seller Support for reimbursement of the 39.99 USD.

Is the subscription your biggest fee?

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The numeric example, end to end

The two plans cross at almost exactly 40 items a month, because 39.99 divided by 0.99 is 40.39. Amazon itself frames the Professional plan as the one that may suit you if your volume exceeds 40 items per month.

• You sell 20 items in a month. Individual costs 20 times 0.99, which is 19.80 USD. Professional costs 39.99 USD. The Individual plan is 20.19 USD cheaper.
• You sell 40 items. Individual costs 39.60 USD. Professional costs 39.99 USD. They are 0.39 USD apart, which is noise.
• You sell 150 items. Individual costs 148.50 USD. Professional costs 39.99 USD. The Professional plan is 108.51 USD cheaper, and that is before the bulk tools save you any time.

Read that in the other direction too. Below 40 items a month, the Professional plan is not a subscription you are using, it is a fixed cost against a variable business. Above it, the per item fee is the expensive option.

What the seller account fee does not cover

The subscription buys access, not fulfilment and not the sale. On top of it you pay:

• The referral fee on each sale, a percentage of the sales price set per category, where Amazon deducts the greater of the category percentage or the per item minimum. The percentages live in Amazon's fee schedule and vary enough by category that quoting one number here would be wrong.
• FBA fulfilment fees if Amazon ships for you. In its 2026 fee update, published on 15 October 2025, Amazon said FBA fees would increase by an average of 0.08 USD per unit sold, effective 15 January 2026.
• Monthly storage on what sits in the fulfilment centre, which is higher in the fourth quarter.
• The returns processing fee on returned units above your category's threshold.

Those four are variable and they are where margin actually goes. The 39.99 USD is the only line on this list you can predict a year ahead.

What it means for your margin

If you are deciding between plans, the only input is your monthly unit count, and the crossover is 40. If you are deciding whether selling on Amazon works at all, the subscription is a rounding error and the referral plus fulfilment stack is the answer. Our walkthrough of how to calculate Amazon FBA profit runs that calculation per unit, and Amazon FBA fees explained covers the fee stack that sits on top of the subscription.

If you are still choosing a plan, Amazon seller account types, individual versus professional compares what each one unlocks beyond the price. And because the Professional plan is also the one tied to your account metrics, the Amazon account health rating explains the score that decides what happens to that account later.

All figures here are the ones Amazon states on its own pages as of October 2026. The 2026 fee changes took effect on 15 January 2026.

#fees#seller central#account

👋Hey! I'm Amara

Press at SellerKey.co

☕ Espresso. Never a latte macchiato.

I cover Amazon fee and policy changes: what changed, when it applies and where Amazon published it.

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