FBA Cost Control  ·  Amazon US

Amazon Long Term Storage Fees in 2026: Every Calculation You Need

If you are still managing FBA inventory against a 365 day clock, you are already paying fees you think do not exist yet. Here is the full dollar maths.

Amazon Assistance  /  Amazon.com marketplace  /  Updated 7 August 2026  /  16 min read

The fee most sellers still call LTSF has been renamed, retriggered and repriced. It is now the Aged Inventory Surcharge, it bills monthly instead of twice a year, and it starts biting at 181 days, not 271 and not 365.

That one change pulls your planning calendar forward by roughly three months. Everything below is for the US marketplace, in dollars, with the actual arithmetic shown so you can drop your own numbers into it.

01What changed, and why it matters more than the rate

The old long term storage fee was a semi annual event. Amazon took a snapshot in February and August, charged units older than 365 days, and most sellers treated it as an annual clean up chore.

That model is gone. Three structural changes replaced it.

1. Monthly assessment. The surcharge is assessed on an inventory snapshot taken on the 15th of each month and billed roughly between the 18th and 22nd. A slow SKU no longer gets hit once a year. It gets hit twelve times.
2. Earlier trigger. The surcharge applies from 181 days in the fulfilment network. Clothing, shoes, bags, jewellery and watches are the exception and start at the 271 day tier.
3. A steeper top end. For 2026 Amazon doubled the 12 to 15 month per unit rate from $0.15 to $0.30 and added a new tier at 15 months and beyond. Inventory over a year old is now priced to be removed, not stored.

The practical consequence: a purchase order placed in January is in surcharge territory by July. If you buy on 90 day ocean lead times, that window is far tighter than it sounds.

02The 2026 fee ladder in dollars

The surcharge is tiered by age. This ladder reflects the structure effective 16 January 2026. Confirm the live numbers in your own Seller Central fee schedule before you build a model on them, because Amazon revises these and mid year adjustments happen.

Tiers from 181 to 270 days exclude clothing, shoes, bags, jewellery and watches, which begin at the 271 day tier. For the top two tiers Amazon charges whichever calculation produces the higher number.

03The four formulas

Everything in this guide runs off four calculations. Learn these and you can price any inventory decision in about ninety seconds.

1. Unit volume
   cubic feet per unit = (L × W × H in inches) ÷ 1,728

2. Monthly storage fee
   volume × units × rate per cu ft
   Standard size: $0.78 Jan to Sep, $2.40 Oct to Dec
   Oversize:      $0.56 Jan to Sep, $1.40 Oct to Dec

3. Aged inventory surcharge
   MAX( total cu ft × tier rate , total units × tier per unit rate )
   Per unit rates only apply from day 366 onward:
   $0.30 at 366 to 455 days, $0.35 at 456 days and up

4. Removal breakeven
   breakeven months = removal cost per unit ÷ monthly hold cost per unit

A worked unit volume, so the first formula is not abstract. A box measuring 9 by 6 by 3 inches is 162 cubic inches. Divided by 1,728 that is 0.094 cubic feet per unit. Four hundred of those units occupy 37.5 cubic feet.

Which surcharge formula wins

From day 366 Amazon charges whichever is higher, the cubic foot number or the per unit number. The crossover point is simple arithmetic: at the 366 to 455 tier, the per unit calculation wins whenever a unit occupies less than 0.0435 cubic feet ($0.30 ÷ $6.90). At the 456 day tier the crossover is 0.0443 cubic feet ($0.35 ÷ $7.90).

In plain terms: anything smaller than roughly a 4 inch cube gets billed on unit count, not on space. Sellers with dense, low volume SKUs assume they are safe because the cubic footage looks trivial. The per unit floor says otherwise.

Same tier, same month, and one seller pays nearly seven times the other. Work out which formula applies to each SKU before you build a removal priority list. It reorders the list.

04The other three storage meters running at the same time

The aged inventory surcharge does not replace anything. It stacks. A single badly managed unit can be paying four charges at once.

The utilisation surcharge does not apply if your average daily inventory in that size tier is 25 cubic feet or less, if your first FBA shipment was within the past 365 days, or to inventory under 30 days old.

What stacking actually costs

Take 100 cubic feet of standard size stock that is 280 days old, sitting at 40 weeks of supply, in November.

The same 100 cubic feet at 90 days old in May costs $78.00. That is the entire argument for inventory velocity in one comparison: the same physical stock costs 11.8 times more purely because of when it arrived and how long it stayed.

05FIFO: why you cannot game the clock

Amazon ages inventory on a first in, first out basis across the entire fulfilment network, at FNSKU level. This catches people out constantly.

• When a unit sells, Amazon deducts it from your oldest cohort regardless of which physical unit was picked. Sales do age down your stock, but only at the rate you actually sell.
• You cannot reset age by sending in fresh units. New inbound queues behind old stock.
• You cannot reset age by shuffling between fulfilment centres. Age is tracked network wide, not by warehouse.
• Customer returns that go back into sellable inventory keep their original age. A unit that shipped on day 200 and came back on day 215 is 215 days old, not zero.

The only true reset is a removal, physically taking units out of the network. Reshipping those same units back in as new inbound rarely pays: a $0.97 removal plus outbound freight plus inbound freight plus an inbound placement fee of $0.21 to $1.58 per unit plus prep will typically run $2.50 to $4.00 per unit. You would need to avoid many months of surcharge to recover that, and you would be paying it on stock you already know does not sell.

06Sizing the shipment: work backwards from the trigger

Most sellers plan forward from a purchase order. Reverse it. Start at the fee trigger and work back.

Max units per shipment = target days of cover × trailing 30 day daily velocity

If the surcharge starts at 181 days and you want a real buffer, no shipment should represent more than 120 to 150 days of forecast demand at the point it lands.

Worked example. A SKU sells 12 units a day on trailing 30 day data. At a 135 day cover target that is 1,620 units maximum per shipment. If your supplier MOQ is 5,000 units, the difference is not a shipping problem. It is a warehousing decision, and the answer is section 06b below.

For stable replenishable SKUs, 30 to 45 days of cover on hand at FBA with a buffer sitting behind it is the modern target. Six months of cover inside a fulfilment centre is no longer safe. It is a fee schedule.

Size the buy, not just the shipment

Cover discipline at the FBA layer is undone by a warehouse full of the same problem. If MOQ forces a twelve month buy, hold that stock at a 3PL, at AWD or in your own warehouse and drip feed FBA in 45 day tranches. Storage fee exposure only starts when the unit enters Amazon's network, so let the cheaper warehouse carry the risk.

The dollar case is usually decisive. Typical 3PL storage runs $0.30 to $0.50 per cubic foot per month against $0.78 at FBA off peak and $2.40 in Q4, and the 3PL never charges an aging surcharge. On 200 cubic feet held through October, November and December, that is $1,440 at FBA against roughly $240 at a 3PL, before any surcharge is even counted.

The four gate calendar

Every inbound cohort should carry four scheduled review points from the day it becomes sellable.

Gate 2 is the one that matters. At day 120 every lever is still available and none of them are expensive. At day 175 you have two levers and both cost money. The difference between a seller who pays aged surcharges and one who does not is almost entirely whether they act at 120 or react at 200.

07The decision at Gate 3: seven options, ranked

When a cohort will not clear, you have seven moves, ranked here roughly by margin preserved.

1. Increase demand at full price. Fix the listing before you cut the price. Aged inventory is frequently a conversion problem, not a demand problem: a weak main image, a missing A+ module, a broken variation family, a suppressed Buy Box. Audit before you discount. This costs nothing.
2. Advertise the aged SKU specifically. Isolate the ASIN into its own campaign with a temporary higher ACoS ceiling, sized by the calculation in the box below.
3. Discount in a ladder, not a cliff. Move in stages of 10, 15 then 20 percent, holding each for 7 to 10 days to read elasticity. Coupons and Prime Exclusive Discounts often outperform a straight price cut because they preserve the reference price and your pricing history.
4. Bundle it. Virtual bundles pair a slow ASIN with a fast one at no inventory cost and no new FNSKU. Physical multipacks work too but need new inbound. Bundling lifts average order value while clearing dead cohorts.
5. Convert to FBM. For any SKU selling under roughly ten units a month, FBA storage economics rarely justify themselves. Removing to your own warehouse and listing seller fulfilled kills the storage fee permanently.
6. Removal order. Get the units back. Standard size runs about $0.97 to $1.78 per unit and oversize up to about $3.50. Amazon cut the rate for standard size aged items under 0.5 lb to about $0.84 per unit in 2026 specifically to encourage timely removals.
7. Liquidation or disposal. FBA Liquidations sells into wholesale channels and returns a recovery percentage. Disposal returns nothing but stops the bleeding. Both beat paying $5.90 per cubic foot indefinitely on stock that will never sell.

08Four worked removal decisions

The two failure modes are equal and opposite: panic removing everything approaching the threshold, and ignoring surcharges until the settlement report shows the damage. Neither is a strategy. Run the numbers.

09How to actually move the inventory

Timing is everything

The snapshot is taken on the 15th. A removal order must be submitted and processed before that snapshot for that month's units to escape the charge. Amazon does not physically ship on the day you click, but flagged units are excluded from the assessment. In practice, submit removal orders by the 10th to 12th at the latest. Submitting on the 15th is submitting late, and in Case B above that single miss costs $676.

Put this in your calendar as a hard recurring task: aged inventory review, 8th of every month.

Choose the right removal type

• Return to address. You get the physical stock back. Best when you have a D2C store, an FBM operation or another marketplace to sell into. Check the return address is current, because a stale one creates a mess.
• Liquidation. Amazon sells into wholesale liquidation channels and pays a recovery percentage. Best when you have no warehouse and recovery beats disposal.
• Disposal. Stops the cost, returns nothing. Reserve it for genuinely unsellable or negative margin stock.

Set automated removals deliberately

Under Settings then Fulfilment by Amazon in Seller Central you can set automated removal preferences. Set them consciously to Return or Liquidate based on whether you can actually receive stock. Leave it unconfigured and Amazon's defaults will eventually make the decision for you, and the default will not optimise for your margin.

Watch what removals do to your other metrics

Bulk removals reduce excess inventory, which helps IPI, but they also reduce in stock rate. Keep IPI above 400 at minimum and above 500 to be comfortable. Below the threshold Amazon restricts your storage capacity, which caps your Q4 upside exactly when you need it.

10The operating cadence

Fee avoidance is a routine, not a project.

Weekly, 15 minutes

• Pull the Inventory Age report under Reports, Fulfilment, Manage Inventory Health
• Filter for anything over 120 days and anything over 200 days
• Check the Recommended Removal report for what Amazon has already flagged
• Confirm no SKU has dropped under 28 days of supply on the other side

Monthly, by the 8th

• Run the removal breakeven on every cohort past 150 days, at both today's tier and next month's tier
• Submit removal or liquidation orders, before the 12th
• Reconcile last month's storage and surcharge line items against your model and investigate variances

Quarterly

• Rebuild cover targets per SKU from the last 90 days of actual velocity, not last quarter's assumptions
• Resegment seasonal against non seasonal SKUs
• Review IPI drivers: excess inventory, sell through, stranded inventory, in stock rate
• Audit stranded and unfulfillable inventory, which ages exactly like everything else while earning nothing

Annually, August to September

• Size Q4 shipments modelled at the $2.40 peak rate and at both 50 and 70 percent sell through. If the margin does not survive 50 percent, you are oversending.

11Nine mistakes that cost real money

1. Planning against 271 or 365 days. The trigger is 181. Most content online still has this wrong.
2. Waiting for Amazon's warning email. By the time the notification lands, the cheapest intervention window has closed.
3. Sending six months of cover in one shipment because the freight rate per unit looked better. The freight saving is smaller than the fee exposure.
4. Assuming returns reset the clock. They do not.
5. Blanket removing seasonal stock in Q3. Case C above is the most expensive prudent decision available.
6. Ignoring the per unit floor on small items. Anything under 0.044 cubic feet gets billed on unit count once it passes 366 days.
7. Overcorrecting into the low inventory level fee. There is a penalty at each end of the corridor.
8. Forgetting stranded inventory. Units with listing errors sit, age and accrue surcharges while being unsellable. Check the Stranded Inventory report weekly.
9. Not modelling storage cost at the PO stage. Storage is a variable cost driven by a decision you made ninety days earlier. Price it into the buy, not into the post mortem.

12The one page checklist

• Pull the current fee schedule from your own Seller Central account, not a blog table
• Calculate cubic feet per unit for every SKU and flag anything under 0.044 cu ft as per unit billed
• Segment the catalogue into seasonal, replenishable and discontinued
• Set maximum days of cover per SKU at 120 to 150 days landed, 30 to 45 days on hand for stable movers
• Move surplus buy quantity to a 3PL or AWD buffer at $0.30 to $0.50 per cu ft and drip feed FBA
• Diary the four gates at day 60, 120, 150 and 175 for every inbound cohort
• Set a hard recurring task: aged inventory review on the 8th of every month
• Configure the automated removal preference deliberately
• Build the cost as percentage of revenue dashboard by cohort, with a hard trigger threshold
• Keep IPI above 500 and days of supply above 28
• Model Q4 shipments at $2.40 per cu ft and 50 percent sell through before committing

13The short version

Amazon is no longer willing to be your warehouse and it has priced accordingly. The fee structure is not a penalty for failure. It is a pricing signal telling you that inventory velocity, not inventory volume, is what the business rewards.

The sellers who never pay this fee are not the ones with the best removal process. They are the ones whose shipments are sized to 120 days, whose Gate 2 review actually happens, and who treat storage cost as a line in the purchase decision rather than a surprise in the settlement report.

Act at day 120. Everything after that costs money.

All figures apply to the Amazon.com marketplace and reflect Amazon's published 2026 rate cards as of August 2026. Worked examples are illustrative and use representative removal and margin assumptions. Amazon revises fee schedules regularly, so verify current rates in your Seller Central fee schedule before making removal or purchasing decisions.