Amazon peak fees and Q4 storage: what changes in your numbers (UK, 2026)

For most UK Amazon sellers the last three months of the year are the busiest of the twelve. Toys move, gift sets move, and stock that sat quietly all summer starts selling every day. It is also the stretch where Amazon changes several fees at once, and a buy that made sense in September can come out a little different in November without anything about the product changing.

This is not a pep talk about Q4. It is the numbers: what Amazon's UK rate card actually changes for the festive season, which items it leaves alone, one product worked through before and during peak, the two storage charges that catch people who overbuy, and the checks worth doing in the aisle before a Q4 buy goes in the trolley. The rate card figures below were read on Amazon's own card, effective 1 July 2026, on 15 September 2026. Amazon changes these, so treat every figure here as something to check rather than memorise.

What changes on 15 October

Amazon's festive peak fulfilment fee applies to UK FBA orders from 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027. On 15 January 2027 fulfilment fees go back to the non-peak rates, which the card says are unchanged from this year's. The key word is orders: the rate depends on when the item sells, not when you bought it or sent it in.

The increase is small per unit, and it does not touch everything:

• Light and standard envelopes - No change. The card prints the same fee for peak and non-peak on every envelope weight band up to 460 g.
• Large and extra-large envelopes - A few pence. A large envelope goes from £2.72 to £2.79.
• Small and standard parcels - Around 11 to 13 pence a unit on the general table. A small parcel up to 150 g goes from £2.91 to £3.02, and a standard parcel up to 900 g from £3.06 to £3.18.
• Selected-category parcels - Grocery, pet food, clothing and the other categories on Amazon's selected list have their own parcel table, and it has its own peak column. The smallest parcel there goes from £2.83 to £2.94 for the first 100 g.
• Oversize and Low-Price FBA - Excluded. Oversize rows print the same fee in both columns, and Low-Price FBA items stay on their own rates.

One ambiguity worth knowing about if you sell clothing. The card's own heading says the peak fee applies to FBA "excluding apparel", yet the selected-category table, whose list includes clothing and accessories, still prints peak rates. If clothing is a real part of what you sell, check the fee preview for a specific listing in Seller Central rather than assuming either way.

On top of whichever rate applies, the 1.5 percent fuel and logistics surcharge Amazon added in April still sits on the fulfilment fee, and the 2 percent digital services fee still sits on all of Amazon's fees together. Neither changes for peak, but both grow a little when the fees underneath them do.

Storage is the fee that really moves

The fulfilment increase gets the attention because it has "peak" in its name. The bigger change is monthly storage, which is charged per cubic foot per month and has a separate October to December rate. On the 1 July 2026 card, for UK standard-size stock that is not classed as dangerous goods:

• Most categories - £0.76 per cubic foot a month from January to September, £1.51 from October to December. Very nearly double.
• Clothing, footwear, eyewear, rucksacks and handbags - £0.62 rising to £0.82.
• Oversize - £0.55 rising to £0.87.

Dangerous goods, meaning anything flammable, pressurised or corrosive, sit on their own higher storage rates, which catches out sellers of aerosols and some beauty lines. Per unit, storage on a small item is still pennies. The point is that it doubles in exactly the months when sellers send in the most stock, and it keeps being charged for every month an item sits there.

One product, before and during peak

Here is the change on a real-shaped example rather than a table. A boxed toy that sells for £24.99 on Amazon UK, in a box 25 by 20 by 8 cm, weighing 420 g. Toys pay a 15 percent referral fee. The box is light but not small for its weight, so Amazon prices it on dimensional weight (length times width times height, divided by 5,000), which puts it at 800 g and makes it a small parcel in the 900 g band.

The figures below come from the same fee model that runs retailscout's free calculator, worked out for a sale on each date, with one month in storage and no costs of your own:

• Referral fee - £3.75 in September, £3.75 in November. It does not change for peak.
• Fulfilment fee, with the fuel surcharge - £3.09 selling on 15 September, £3.20 selling on 10 November.
• One month of storage - £0.11 at the September rate, £0.21 at the November rate.
• Digital services fee - £0.14 and £0.14.
• Amazon's fees in total - £7.09 in September against £7.30 in November.

So peak costs this toy £0.21 a unit, before VAT on the fees and before your own costs. On a buy of forty units that is real money, but it is not the thing that decides whether the buy was good. The honest conclusion from the arithmetic is that the peak fee is a rounding error on a sound Q4 buy. What turns a Q4 buy bad is the stock that does not sell by January.

The two charges that punish Q4 overbuying

Both of these sit on top of monthly storage, and both are about stock sitting in a fulfilment centre for too long relative to how fast it sells. Buying heavily for Christmas is exactly how sellers walk into them in January.

• Storage utilisation surcharge - An extra charge per cubic foot per month when your stored volume is high compared with what you ship. Amazon works it out as a ratio in weeks: average daily volume stored divided by average daily volume shipped over the last 13 weeks. Above 22 weeks the surcharge starts, and it climbs in steps from there. It does not apply to new sellers in their first 52 weeks, to Individual selling accounts, or to sellers storing less than 25 cubic feet a day, which covers a lot of side-hustle sellers.
• Aged inventory surcharge - An extra monthly charge on units that have been in a fulfilment centre for more than 240 days, rising as they age. Stock bought for Christmas that is still sitting there the following summer ends up here.

Neither of these can be priced per product. The utilisation ratio depends on your whole account, and ageing depends on what happens after you buy, so no calculator, ours included, can put a figure for them on a single deal. What you can do is buy in quantities you are confident will sell through before the new year, and treat a line with a weak January as a line to buy lightly.

Timing: when to buy for Q4, and when to stop

The fees are the easy part. The harder part is the calendar, and it runs backwards from the week your stock needs to be sellable.

• Amazon's own deadlines come first - Every year Amazon publishes its recommended dates for getting inventory into fulfilment centres ahead of the holidays, and each account has its own capacity limits on how much it can send. Both sit in Seller Central, and they are the dates and limits that matter. A date quoted on a forum or in a video is somebody else's account in somebody else's year.
• September to November is the buying window - Seasonal ranges land on UK shelves early, and so do the toy and gift-set lines that sell hardest in December. Buy early enough that the stock is checked in and sellable before the rush, not queued behind everybody else's.
• Late in the season, fulfil it yourself - Once stock can no longer reach a fulfilment centre in time, selling it by merchant fulfilment is the option left. No fulfilment fee and no storage, but you pack, post and meet Amazon's dispatch promise yourself, in the busiest weeks for Royal Mail and couriers.
• After Christmas, the trips change - Late December and January are when UK retailers clear seasonal stock hardest, and gift sets in particular come down in steps. That clearance is a different trade: you buy cheap and hold for next year or for the spring gifting dates, so storage months matter more than peak fees.

Checking a Q4 buy in the aisle

Everything above comes down to four questions you can answer standing in front of the shelf, and they are the same four whether you are buying in October or clearing gift sets in January.

1. Did this product actually have a Q4 last year? Not every product that looks seasonal sells seasonally. Monthly sales history tells you whether last November and December were busy for this line, or whether it sells the same all year and the Christmas packaging is just packaging.
2. Does it still clear after peak fees and a realistic storage stay? Set the storage months to how long you honestly expect it to sit, not one month because that makes the ROI look better.
3. Would it be better sent in, or fulfilled yourself? For a slow or bulky line late in the season the answer can flip, and it is worth seeing both sums side by side.
4. Are you allowed to sell it? Toys and beauty are two of the categories where brands are restricted most often, and discovering it after the stock arrives in December is the most expensive way to learn. Our guide to checking whether you can sell a product on Amazon covers why gating is decided per account and when to run the check.

retailscout's deal analyser is built to answer those four from one barcode scan. You can run the deal analysis on the product in your hand and get profit, ROI and a 0 to 100 buy score on your own costs, with a seasonality card that plots the last 13 months of sales by calendar month and highlights the two busiest, so a real Q4 seller and a flat one look different at a glance. Storage months can be set per deal rather than left at a default, there is a switch between FBA and merchant fulfilment, and if you connect your Amazon selling account the app checks whether you can list the product. The eligibility check is a paid-membership feature, so during the 7-day free trial you will see the prompt rather than the verdict.

If you want to try the arithmetic on a product before any of that, the free Amazon FBA calculator and the fees behind it takes a price, a cost and a box size and shows every fee, your profit and ROI, with the size tiers and the digital services fee explained line by line.

A Q4 checklist

• Find Amazon's inbound dates in Seller Central.
• Buy seasonal lines early enough to sell.
• Check last year's November and December sales.
• Price storage for how long it will really sit.
• Buy what will sell through before January.
• Check eligibility before the till, not after.
• Plan the post-Christmas clearance trips now.

The short version

From 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027 Amazon UK charges a slightly higher fulfilment fee on most parcels and a few envelope sizes, and from October to December storage roughly doubles for most categories. On a typical small parcel the peak fulfilment increase is 11 to 13 pence a unit before the surcharges. The fee that decides whether Q4 was profitable is not the peak fee, it is what you pay to store stock that did not sell, so buy what last year's sales say will move, price storage honestly, check you can sell it, and get it in before Amazon's own deadlines.

retailscout plans profitable sourcing trips and catches retailer price drops between them, with the deal analyser for checking every buy on the way. It is £14.99 a month for the lot, with a 7-day free trial, and you can cancel anytime.