Every product on Amazon pays the same toll, and no two categories pay it at the same rate. The referral fee is Amazon’s commission on a sale — a percentage of the price, taken on every order, whether the parcel ships from Amazon’s warehouse or your own garage. Most categories sit at 15%. Electronics pay 8%. Clothing pays 17%. Jewelry pays 20% up to $250, then 5% above it. The spread in this article runs from 8% to 45%, and on a $48.00 product that spread is worth $17.76 a unit before a single other cost is counted. This article is the table itself, kept in one place so a seller can look a category up instead of guessing it. The rates are Amazon’s published US schedule at the time of writing, and the five rates our own free Amazon FBA profit calculator uses are marked in the table. Amazon changes its schedules, so confirm your exact category and rate in Seller Central before you price. What follows is the table, the three traps inside it, and three worked examples — the last of them carried all the way to a break-even price.
The Table: Amazon Referral Fees by Category, 2026
Read the table in four bands. The first band is the default: if your category is not listed anywhere below, assume 15% until Seller Central tells you otherwise, because most categories live there. The second band is cheaper than the default, the third is dearer, and the fourth is tiered — the rate changes at a price threshold, and the higher rate applies to the whole price, not just the part above the line. The five rates marked † are also the defaults in our FBA profit calculator. Everything else in the table is Amazon’s published schedule, quoted at the time of writing.
| Category | Referral fee (US) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Most categories † | 15% | The default rate. Books, furniture, home & garden, kitchen, office products, outdoors, pet supplies, sports, tools, toys, musical instruments, luggage, mattresses, software & video games, shoes & handbags, and patio & garden all sit here. |
| Electronics & computers † | 8% | Consumer electronics, computers and accessories. |
| Camera & photo | 8% | Cameras, lenses and photo accessories. |
| Cell phones & accessories | 8% | Phones, cases, chargers and accessories. |
| Video game consoles | 8% | Consoles only; games themselves are 15%. |
| Major appliances | 8% | Large household appliances. |
| Collectible coins | 8% | Coins and currency collectibles. |
| Entertainment collectibles | 8% | Collectible figures, memorabilia and similar. |
| Automotive & powersports † | 12% | Parts, accessories and powersports gear. |
| Industrial & scientific | 12% | Industrial supplies and scientific equipment. |
| Clothing & accessories † | 17% | Apparel, footwear accessories and fashion items. |
| Watches | 16% up to $1,500, then 3% | The higher rate applies to the whole price up to $1,500; above it, 3%. |
| Jewelry † | 20% up to $250, then 5% | The higher rate applies to the whole price up to $250; above it, 5%. |
| Fine art | 20% | Original art and limited editions. |
| Amazon device accessories | 45% | Accessories for Amazon’s own devices — the dearest rate in the schedule. |
| Baby products | 8% up to $10, then 15% | Tiered: the threshold is the total price. |
| Beauty | 8% up to $10, then 15% | Tiered: the threshold is the total price. |
| Health & personal care | 8% up to $10, then 15% | Tiered: the threshold is the total price. |
| Grocery & gourmet food | 8% up to $15, then 15% | Tiered: the threshold is the total price. |
| DVD & Blu-ray | 8% up to $50, then 15% | Tiered: the threshold is the total price. |
† Also a default rate in our FBA profit calculator and documented in our fees guide. Two footnotes before you use the table. First, the category Amazon charges you for is the one its catalogue assigns to your product, which is not always the category you would choose for it — the assignment trap below is about exactly that. Second, these are US rates; the UK and European stores run their own schedules, covered at the end of this article.
How the Fee Is Actually Charged
The referral fee is a percentage of the total price the buyer pays: the item price plus any shipping charge the customer pays. It is charged on every sale, in every category, and it is the one Amazon fee that no fulfilment choice avoids. Sell through FBA and it sits beside the fulfilment fee; sell through FBM and it sits alone. It is also separate from the selling plan: the Professional plan costs $39.99 a month whether you sell one unit or a thousand, and the Individual plan replaces it with $0.99 per item sold, at the time of writing — both on top of the referral fee, never instead of it.
Two details catch new sellers. The first is the floor: Amazon’s published schedule carries a minimum referral fee of $0.30 per item, at the time of writing, so a very cheap product pays a higher effective rate than its category suggests — the third trap below works the number. The second is refunds: on a refunded order Amazon generally returns the referral fee, but the exceptions sit in Seller Central’s refund rules for your category.
The fee is the price of the marketplace itself: the buyers, the search, the trust, the checkout. A seller who knows the rate before pricing can carry it; a seller who discovers it in the settlement report cannot. That is the whole job of the table above — to move the discovery from after the sale to before the price.
Three Traps the Table Hides
A table looks complete, and that is its danger.
The threshold trap. In a tiered category the rate does not apply to the part of the price above the line; it applies to the whole price once the line is crossed. A Beauty product at $10.00 pays 8%, or $0.80. The same product at $10.01 pays 15%, or $1.50 — a $0.70 jump for a one-cent price rise, worked in full in the second example below. Pricing a tiered product at $10.49 because the number looks friendlier than $9.99 is not a rounding choice; it is a decision to pay the higher rate on the entire sale. Price tiered products just under their threshold on purpose, or not at all.
The assignment trap. Amazon assigns the category from the product, not from the seller’s preference, and a product that could plausibly sit in two categories will be charged at the one Amazon picks. A gadget that is also a fashion accessory, a kitchen tool that is also a toy: the catalogue’s answer is the one that bills. Worse, some categories need approval before you can list in them at all — our ungating guide covers what Amazon asks for — so a seller who plans a launch around an 8% category and discovers the listing actually sits in a 17% one has lost the margin twice: once to the rate, once to the delay. Confirm the category in Seller Central before you order inventory, not after it lands.
The cheap-item trap. The $0.30 minimum referral fee bites hardest where the price is lowest. A $1.50 accessory in a 15% category owes 15% of $1.50, which is $0.23 — below the floor, so Amazon charges $0.30 instead, an effective rate of 20%. At $1.00 the same maths gives an effective 30%. Low-ticket products look like volume plays until the minimum turns their cheapest line into their dearest rate. If your catalogue has items under $2.00, run the minimum through the calculator before you call them profitable.
Worked Example One: The Same $48.00 Product, Two Categories
Take an invented product at $48.00 and hold everything about it still except the category. The arithmetic is the whole point, so here it is in full.
| Category | Rate | Referral fee on $48.00 |
|---|---|---|
| Most categories | 15% | $7.20 |
| Electronics & computers | 8% | $3.84 |
| Difference per unit | 7 points | $3.36 |
$48.00 × 0.15 = $7.20. $48.00 × 0.08 = $3.84. The gap is $3.36 on every single unit, and it scales with volume exactly as a fee does: 500 units a month and the category alone is worth $1,680.00 a month — $3.36 × 500. Nothing about the product changed. No price moved, no cost moved, no customer behaved differently. This is why the category question belongs in product research, before the purchase order, and why our product research guide treats the fee schedule as a selection filter rather than a billing footnote. A product that is marginal at 15% can be comfortable at 8%; a product that is comfortable at 8% can be dead at 17%.
Worked Example Two: One Cent Across the Beauty Threshold
Now the tiered case, where the trap is not the rate but the line. An invented Beauty product, priced four ways, with every fee worked out.
| Price | Rate | Referral fee |
|---|---|---|
| $9.50 | 8% | $0.76 |
| $10.00 | 8% | $0.80 |
| $10.01 | 15% | $1.50 |
| $12.00 | 15% | $1.80 |
$9.50 × 0.08 = $0.76. $10.00 × 0.08 = $0.80. $10.01 × 0.15 = $1.50. $12.00 × 0.15 = $1.80. Read the middle two rows together: a one-cent price rise, from $10.00 to $10.01, raises the fee by $0.70 — seventy times the price rise. The right price for this product is $9.99, not $10.01, and the right question at launch is which side of the threshold the price sits on. Baby, health and grocery products carry the same $10 and $15 lines; jewelry carries a $250 one — a $251.00 item pays $50.00 on the first $250 plus $0.05 on the dollar above it, $50.05 in total.
Worked Example Three: The 17% Clothing Stack, Down to Break-Even
The first two examples isolate the fee. This one puts it back into the stack, on the same invented clothing item our calculator page uses: a $42.00 product in clothing & accessories, where the referral rate is 17%. Every product figure is invented and labelled as such; every rate is the documented one, at the time of writing.
| Line | Per unit |
|---|---|
| Selling price | $42.00 |
| Product cost (landed, invented) | −$13.00 |
| Inbound shipping (invented) | −$1.50 |
| Referral fee (17%) | −$7.14 |
| Fulfilment fee (large standard, invented tier) | −$5.20 |
| Fuel & logistics surcharge (3.5% of fulfilment) | −$0.18 |
| Storage (invented) | −$0.40 |
| Total cost | $27.42 |
| Net profit | $14.58 |
| Margin | 34.7% |
$42.00 × 0.17 = $7.14. The surcharge is 3.5% of the $5.20 fulfilment fee, which is $0.18. Add the stack: $7.14 + $5.20 + $0.18 + $0.40 + $1.50 + $13.00 = $27.42 of total cost. Net profit is $42.00 − $27.42 = $14.58, a margin of 34.7% — $14.58 divided by $42.00. The referral fee is the single largest Amazon line in the stack, larger than fulfilment, and it is the only line that moves when the price moves. That is what makes the break-even price worth deriving rather than guessing.
The price-independent cost — everything except the referral fee — is $13.00 + $1.50 + $5.20 + $0.18 + $0.40 = $20.28. Break-even price = $20.28 ÷ (1 − 0.17) = $24.43. Check it from the other direction: at $24.43 the 17% referral fee is $4.15, and $20.28 + $4.15 = $24.43 — profit of exactly zero, which is the point of the number. Below $24.43 this product loses money at any volume; above it, every sale contributes. Run the same derivation on your own product in our free FBA profit calculator, which carries the 17% clothing rate as a default and works the break-even price out for you.
One more move the stack makes visible: discounting. Cut this product from $42.00 to $38.00 and the referral fee obligingly falls from $7.14 to $6.46 — $38.00 × 0.17 — saving $0.68. But the price itself fell $4.00, so profit falls by $4.00 − $0.68 = $3.32 a unit. A discount saves a little fee and costs a lot of profit, because the fee is a percentage and the price is the whole. The same maths, run the other way, is why a price rise in a low-rate category is worth more than the same rise in a high-rate one: at 8%, a $4.00 rise keeps $3.68 of itself; at 17%, it keeps $3.32.
Referral Fee vs the Other Amazon Charges
Sellers mix the fee lines up because Amazon bills them together. They behave differently, and the table below is the short version of the whole article.
| Charge | How it is set | When you pay it |
|---|---|---|
| Referral fee | Percentage of the sale price, by category | Every sale, FBA or FBM |
| Fulfilment fee (FBA) | Per unit, by size tier and weight | Only on FBA orders |
| Monthly storage | Per cubic foot, by season | Every month inventory sits |
| Selling-plan fee | $39.99 a month, or $0.99 an item | Monthly, or per item on the Individual plan |
| PPC | Your bids, per click | Only when you advertise — and not an Amazon fee at all |
The referral fee is the only line in that table that scales with your price and applies to every order. Everything else is fixed per unit, per month, or per click. That single property is why it decides the break-even price, why it punishes discounts, and why it rewards a low-rate category more than any packaging change ever will. The companion read is our FBA calculator audit in four passes, which runs one invented product through the full ten-line stack.
Using the Table When You Price
A table only earns its place if it changes a decision. Three uses, in the order a seller actually meets them. First, at product selection: before you order, look the category up and run the fee into the margin. A product that needs 15% to work is a different bet from one that works at 17% with room to spare, and the table tells you which bet you are making. Second, at launch pricing: check the threshold. If the product sits in a tiered category, price under the line on purpose — $9.99, not $10.01 — and in a flat category, remember every dollar of price carries the fee with it.
Third, at the account level: confirm the category Amazon has actually assigned to each listing, in Seller Central, and re-check it after any catalogue change or relisting, because the assignment is what bills. If a listing is sitting in a dearer category than the product deserves, the fix is a catalogue correction, not a price rise. If the numbers still do not work on your live figures, that is the point at which outside help pays for itself: our Amazon account management work starts with exactly this run, on the seller’s own Seller Central numbers rather than a guide’s defaults, and our free audit will run it on your live catalogue and show you which lines are eating the margin.
A Note on UK and European Stores
Everything in this table is the US schedule. The UK and European stores run their own referral schedules, with different category rates and VAT sitting on top of the sale, so do not carry a US rate into a UK listing and expect the settlement report to agree. If you sell into the UK or Europe, our guide to selling on Amazon UK and Europe covers the VAT and account setup that sits on top of these fees. The principle travels even where the numbers do not.