What Percentage Does Amazon FBA Take From a Sale?

What percentage does Amazon FBA take? One line of your fee breakdown is a percentage. The rest arrives in dollars per unit, so the share Amazon keeps is decided by your price, not by a number you can look up once and write down.

The only fee charged as a percentage of your sale

The referral fee is a percentage of the total sales price, and the rate belongs to the category the ASIN sits in. Amazon publishes it when it changes. In its update to US referral and FBA fees, dated December 5, 2023, apparel dropped from 17% to 5% for items priced under $15, and to 10% for items priced between $15 and $20, effective January 15, 2024. The same notice says other referral fees remain unchanged.

Read that twice, because it is the shape of the whole system: one category, two rates, and a price line between them. The percentage is not a property of your product. It is a property of your category and your price band.

Everything else is dollars per unit

• FBA fulfillment fee. Per unit, by size tier and weight. For 2026 Amazon said FBA fees would rise by an average of $0.08 per unit sold, less than 0.5% of an average item's selling price, effective January 15, 2026, with no new FBA fee types that year. The year before, it did not raise US referral or FBA fees at all.
• Inbound placement service fee. An average of $0.27 per unit for standard size and $1.58 for Large Bulky, effective March 1, 2024, charged 45 days after the inventory is received.
• Fuel and logistics surcharge. 3.5% applied to fulfillment fees from April 17, 2026. It is written as a percentage, but of the fee, not of your sale.
• Holiday peak fulfillment fee. From October 15, 2026 to January 14, 2027, an average of $0.32 per unit over non-peak rates.
• Storage, aged inventory surcharge, returns processing. Charged by volume and by time, not by sale.

Only one of those scales with your price. The other five are the same whether the unit sells for $14 or $40.

What does Amazon keep per unit?

See my fee split

The arithmetic, end to end

Take one apparel unit, using Amazon's own published rates.

At $14.00, the referral fee is 5%, so $0.70. That is 5.0% of the sale. At $18.00, the referral fee is 10%, so $1.80. That is 10.0% of the sale.

Four dollars of price doubled the referral percentage, because the price crossed the $15 band. Now add the flat charges. Every per-unit dollar weighs differently at each price: $1.00 of fulfillment and placement is 7.1% of a $14 sale and 5.6% of an $18 one. The 3.5% surcharge is calculated on the fulfillment fee, so it scales with the fee, not with the price.

So the honest formula for an Amazon FBA take rate on a single unit is this:

take rate = referral % + (fulfillment fee + 3.5% of the fulfillment fee + placement + storage share + returns share) / price

Put a cheap unit through it and the flat dollars dominate. Put an expensive unit through it and the referral fee dominates. A seller quoting one figure for the whole catalog is quoting the average of two different problems.

Where your own number comes from

Amazon states that the Revenue Calculator and the Fee and Economics Preview report were updated with the 2026 rates. Those two are the only places a per-ASIN fulfillment fee exists: there is no page that prints one percentage for FBA, and anyone showing you one built it from a sample of accounts that is not yours. Our own breakdown of every FBA charge and the date it applies from lists the lines you will see, and how to calculate Amazon FBA profit walks the same numbers down to profit per unit.

What it means for your margin

Three decisions move your take rate more than any fee negotiation.

Price bands. Inside a category, a rate can change at a price line. Repricing from $15.49 down to $14.95 can move the referral rate in your favour, and repricing up by 50 cents can move it against you. Check the band before a Q4 price change, not after.

Cheap units. Flat per-unit dollars are a tax on low prices. The same fulfillment fee that is invisible on a $40 unit is the margin on a $12 one. That is where bundles, multipacks and dropping the SKU all become real options.

Time in the warehouse. FBA storage fees and the aged inventory surcharge are the only parts of the bill you control after the unit is sent, and the fuel and logistics surcharge rides on top of fulfillment. Units that sit do not just hold cash: they add a line that was not in your original calculation.

SellerKey reads the fees Amazon reports on your account and shows the share each one takes per ASIN. It does not change prices or listings in Amazon. It tells you which units are paying the flat dollars.

“FBA fees will increase by an average of $0.08 per unit sold”

— Amazon Selling Partners ↗

#fees#FBA#margin

👋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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