Amazon Referral Fees by Category (2026): The Full Percentage List
The referral fee is the one Amazon charge you cannot engineer away. You can shrink a fulfillment fee by redesigning a box, and you can cut ad spend by pausing a campaign, but the referral percentage is set by the category Amazon has assigned your listing — and you almost certainly picked that category once, years ago, in a dropdown you have not looked at since.
I have sold physical products on Amazon since 2014, and category assignment is the closest thing to free money I have found in twelve years of doing this. It is also the fee line where the published tables are least reliable, because most of them flatten three genuinely different pricing mechanics into one column and quietly get the math wrong. This page is the version I actually work from.
Referral fees run from 5% to 45% in 2026, and the rates have not changed since January 2024. Most categories sit at a flat 15%. Electronics, computers and full-size appliances are 8%. Amazon Device Accessories is 45%, the worst rate on the platform. But the headline percentage is not what you pay: the fee is charged on the item price plus shipping and gift wrap, a $0.30 floor overrides the percentage on cheap items, media pays an extra $1.80 flat, and four categories have a price cliff where charging one cent more leaves you with less money.
The full 2026 referral fee table
Rates below are the US marketplace rates as published for 2026. The third column is the one no other table gives you, and it is the one that determines whether you can do the arithmetic correctly — I explain what “band” and “split” mean in the next section.
| Category | Referral fee | How it is applied |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Device Accessories | 45% | Flat |
| Appliances — compact | 15% up to $300, then 8% | Split |
| Appliances — full-size | 8% | Flat |
| Automotive & Powersports | 12% | Flat |
| Baby Products | 8% at $10 or less, 15% above | Band |
| Backpacks, Handbags & Luggage | 15% | Flat |
| Base Equipment Power Tools | 12% | Flat |
| Beauty, Health & Personal Care | 8% at $10 or less, 15% above | Band |
| Business, Industrial & Scientific | 12% | Flat |
| Clothing & Accessories | 5% at $15 or less; 10% $15.01–$20; 17% above $20 | Band |
| Computers | 8% | Flat |
| Consumer Electronics | 8% | Flat |
| Electronics Accessories | 15% up to $100, then 8% | Split |
| Eyewear | 15% | Flat |
| Fine Art | 20% up to $100; 15% to $1,000; 10% to $5,000; 5% above | Split |
| Footwear | 15% | Flat |
| Furniture | 15% up to $200, then 10% | Split |
| Gift Cards | 20% | Flat |
| Grocery & Gourmet | 8% at $15 or less, 15% above | Band |
| Home & Kitchen | 15% | Flat |
| Jewelry | 20% up to $250, then 5% | Split |
| Lawn & Garden | 15% | Flat |
| Lawn Mowers & Snow Throwers | 15% up to $500, then 8% | Split |
| Media — books, DVD, music, software, video | 15% plus a $1.80 closing fee | Flat |
| Musical Instruments & AV Production | 15% | Flat |
| Office Products | 15% | Flat |
| Pet Supplies | 15% (22% on veterinary diets) | Flat |
| Sports & Outdoors | 15% | Flat |
| Tires | 10% | Flat |
| Tools & Home Improvement | 15% | Flat |
| Toys & Games | 15% | Flat |
| Video Game Consoles | 8% | Flat |
| Video Games & Gaming Accessories | 15% | Flat |
| Watches | 16% up to $1,500, then 3% | Split |
| Everything Else | 15% | Flat |
Two things to note before you use it. First, the fee is calculated on the total sales price — item price plus any shipping you charge plus any gift wrap the buyer adds, with sales tax excluded. A $25 item with $5 shipping in a 15% category pays 15% of $30, which is $4.50, not $3.75. If you have been modeling on item price alone, every margin number you own is 15% of your shipping charge too optimistic.
Second, referral rates were the only Amazon fee that did not move this year. They have been frozen since January 2024 and are unchanged for 2026. Everything around them moved: FBA fulfillment fees rose an average of $0.08 per unit on January 15, a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge landed on fulfillment fees on April 17, inbound defect fees replaced the discontinued prep service, and the aged-inventory surcharge now starts at 181 days. If you are updating your cost model, the referral column is the one row you can leave alone.
The three mechanics — and the one most tables get wrong
This is where published fee tables fail, and it is not a rounding quibble. Amazon uses three different mechanics, and two of them look identical in a table but behave in opposite ways.
Flat is what it sounds like: one percentage, whole price, no thresholds. Home & Kitchen at 15%, Consumer Electronics at 8%. Nothing to get wrong.
Split categories charge different rates on different portions of the price, the way income tax brackets work. Amazon's language is the tell: “20% for the portion of the total sales price up to $250, plus 5% for any portion greater than $250.” A $300 piece of jewelry pays 20% on the first $250 and 5% on the last $50 — $50.00 plus $2.50, a $52.50 fee and a 17.5% effective rate. Jewelry, Watches, Furniture, Fine Art, Electronics Accessories, compact Appliances, and Lawn Mowers all work this way.
Band categories are different, and this is the one that costs people money. The threshold selects a rate, and then that single rate applies to the entire price. Amazon's language changes accordingly: “5% for products with a total sales price of $15.00 or less; 10% for products with a total sales price greater than $15.00 and less than or equal to $20.00; 17% for products with a total sales price greater than $20.00.” Clothing & Accessories, Baby Products, Beauty/Health/Personal Care, and Grocery & Gourmet are band categories.
Here is the same $22 hoodie under both readings, which is the error I see repeated in almost every fee article and more than one spreadsheet template:
| Method | Calculation on a $22 apparel item | Fee | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Band — how Amazon actually bills it | 17% × $22.00 | $3.74 | 17.0% |
| Split — the common mistake | 5% × $15 + 10% × $5 + 17% × $2 | $1.59 | 7.2% |
That is a $2.15 error per unit, in the direction that makes a product look profitable when it is not. At 400 units a month it is $860 of margin that exists only in the spreadsheet. If you sell apparel, baby, beauty or grocery and you built your model on bracketed math, re-run it before you read any further.
The price cliffs: where one more cent leaves you with less
Because band categories apply the new rate to the whole price, crossing a threshold is a cliff, not a step. The fee does not rise by a few cents — it jumps by the rate difference applied to everything.
Take apparel at the $20 line. At exactly $20.00 you pay 10%, or $2.00, and keep $18.00 before your other costs. At $20.01 you pay 17%, or $3.40, and keep $16.61. You raised your price by a penny and lost $1.39. Worse, you do not climb back to $18.00 of take-home until $21.69 — so every price between $20.01 and $21.68 is strictly worse for you than $20.00, while also being worse for the customer.
All four band categories have this structure. These are the dead zones:
| Category | Cliff | Fee at the line vs. one cent over | Dead zone — priced here, you keep less | Price you must reach to get back to even |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clothing & Accessories | $15.00 | $0.75 → $1.50 | $15.01 – $15.82 | $15.83 |
| Clothing & Accessories | $20.00 | $2.00 → $3.40 | $20.01 – $21.68 | $21.69 |
| Baby Products | $10.00 | $0.80 → $1.50 | $10.01 – $10.81 | $10.82 |
| Beauty, Health & Personal Care | $10.00 | $0.80 → $1.50 | $10.01 – $10.81 | $10.82 |
| Grocery & Gourmet | $15.00 | $1.20 → $2.25 | $15.01 – $16.22 | $16.23 |
Two practical consequences. If you are repricing upward and the increase would carry you into a dead zone, either stop at the threshold or jump clean past the break-even price — the middle is pure loss. And if a repricer is managing your apparel catalog, check whether it knows about these lines at all. Most repricers optimize for the Buy Box, not for the fee schedule, and will happily park a SKU at $20.49 forever.
The split categories have no cliff, which is worth knowing in the other direction: crossing $250 on jewelry or $200 on furniture only ever helps you, because the lower rate applies to the portion above the line. There is no reason to hold a $255 necklace at $249.
The $0.30 minimum, and where the floor beats the percentage
Most categories carry a minimum referral fee of $0.30 per unit. When the percentage works out to less than that, you pay $0.30. Sellers dismiss this as trivial, and on a $30 product it is. On anything cheap it stops being a percentage fee at all and becomes a flat tax.
| Category rate | The percentage equals $0.30 at | Below that, an example | Real effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5% | $6.00 | $3.00 item pays $0.30 | 10.0% |
| 8% | $3.75 | $2.00 item pays $0.30 | 15.0% |
| 10% | $3.00 | $2.00 item pays $0.30 | 15.0% |
| 12% | $2.50 | $1.50 item pays $0.30 | 20.0% |
| 15% | $2.00 | $1.00 item pays $0.30 | 30.0% |
| 17% | $1.77 | $1.00 item pays $0.30 | 30.0% |
| 20% | $1.50 | $1.00 item pays $0.30 | 30.0% |
| 45% | $0.67 | $0.50 item pays $0.30 | 60.0% |
The 5% row is the one that surprises people: cheap apparel is advertised as Amazon's friendliest rate, but below $6.00 the floor takes over and a $3 accessory is really paying 10%. If you sell sub-$5 add-ons, consumables or spare parts, the fix is bundling — two units in one listing above the floor beats two listings below it. A few categories set a higher floor than $0.30, including Fine Art and Handmade at $1.00, so check yours rather than assuming.
Media's $1.80 closing fee is a regressive tax
Books, DVDs, music, software and video pay a $1.80 variable closing fee per unit on top of the 15% referral fee. It is flat, so it does not scale with price — which means it punishes cheap media and barely registers on expensive titles.
| Sale price | Referral fee (15%) | Closing fee | Total Amazon fee | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5.99 | $0.90 | $1.80 | $2.70 | 45.1% |
| $9.99 | $1.50 | $1.80 | $3.30 | 33.0% |
| $14.99 | $2.25 | $1.80 | $4.05 | 27.0% |
| $24.99 | $3.75 | $1.80 | $5.55 | 22.2% |
| $49.99 | $7.50 | $1.80 | $9.30 | 18.6% |
A $5.99 paperback hands Amazon 45% of the sale before you have paid for the book, the box or the postage. That is the same effective rate as Amazon Device Accessories, from a category everyone thinks of as a 15% category. If you sell used media at low price points, the closing fee — not the referral fee — is your binding constraint, and the only lever is price.
What you do not get back on a return
When a customer returns an item, Amazon refunds the referral fee but keeps 20% of it as a refund administration charge, capped at $5.00 per unit. This is real money and almost nobody reserves for it.
On a $40 Home & Kitchen sale the referral fee is $6.00. Refund it and Amazon keeps $1.20. At 500 units a month and an 8% return rate, that is 40 returns, $48 a month, $576 a year — from the referral line alone, before the returned unit's fulfillment cost, inbound freight or lost sellable condition. Reserve for returns against the whole fee stack, not just the product.
The audit, and what it is actually worth
Amazon assigns your category from the browse node you chose plus the attributes it detects on the listing, and it re-derives that assignment during catalog updates without telling you. That is the part worth internalizing: your referral rate can change overnight with no action on your part and no notification.
Some products genuinely qualify for more than one category, and the gap is not small:
| Product | Plausible category A | Rate | Plausible category B | Rate | Gap on a $40 unit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bluetooth speaker | Consumer Electronics | 8% | Home & Kitchen | 15% | $2.80 |
| Fitness tracker | Consumer Electronics | 8% | Sports & Outdoors | 15% | $2.80 |
| Baby monitor | Consumer Electronics | 8% | Baby Products (above $10) | 15% | $2.80 |
| Desk organizer | Business, Industrial & Scientific | 12% | Office Products | 15% | $1.20 |
A $2.80 per-unit gap at 400 units a month is $1,120 a month and $13,440 a year, recovered without touching your product, your price or your ad spend. I have never found another operational change with that ratio of payoff to effort.
Twice a year, and after any Amazon catalog update I notice, I pull Reports → Payments → Transaction View in Seller Central, filter to referral fees, and divide the fee paid by the total sales price for each SKU. That gives me the effective rate, which is the only number that matters. Then I compare it to the rate the category should produce. Anything more than about two points off gets investigated — usually it is promotions or returns rather than a miscategorization, but twice now it has been the category, and both times the fix paid for the afternoon many times over. My own kitchen line sits in Home & Kitchen at a flat 15% with no threshold to play, so for me the audit is purely defensive: I am checking that nothing drifted. If you sell anything that could plausibly read as electronics, the upside case is live for you in a way it is not for me.
If you find a SKU in the wrong place, request the correction through Seller Central with the correct browse node and supporting attributes, and cite comparable listings already sitting in the lower-fee category. One caution: do not request a category you cannot defend. Amazon reverts unsupported changes and flags the listing, and a flagged listing costs more than three fee points.
Working backwards to a price floor
The referral fee is not just a cost, it is a constraint on how low you can price. The floor is:
Minimum price = (COGS + fulfillment cost + target profit) ÷ (1 − referral %)
For a product in my own line — $8.00 landed COGS, $5.12 FBA fulfillment fee including this April's surcharge, and a $6.00 per-unit profit target in a 15% category — that is $19.12 ÷ 0.85, or $22.49. Below that price the SKU is not thin, it is negative, and no amount of volume fixes it. Note that the divisor changes with the category, so if you sell across several you need several floors; a blanket markup does not survive a range that runs from 8% to 17%.
The fastest way to see this on your own product is to put your numbers into the Amazon FBA calculator and change only the referral percentage. Watch what seven points does to net profit per unit, then go and check what category your listing is actually in. If the fee itself is what you want to attack, the companion piece on how to lower Amazon referral fees covers the levers in order of payoff.
Referral percentages, the $0.30 minimum, the $1.80 media closing fee and the 20% refund administration charge reviewed August 2026 against Amazon's published 2026 US referral fee schedule. Rates vary by category, price band and marketplace, and Amazon can reassign a listing's category without notice — confirm your own SKU in Seller Central before you price on these numbers. I am a seller, not an accountant.
