Amazon ran its monthly aged inventory assessment on May 15, and the charges are hitting FBA seller accounts this week, between May 18 and May 22. If you haven't looked at your Seller Central account yet this morning, now is a good time. This is also the second assessment cycle under the new 181-day threshold that took effect in January 2026, which means a lot of sellers are seeing surcharges on inventory that would have been fine under last year's rules.
Here's what changed, what the charges look like, and what to do before the June 15 assessment locks in next month's bill.
The Threshold Change That Caught Sellers Off Guard
For most of recent memory, Amazon's aged inventory surcharge kicked in at 271 days of FBA storage. Starting January 16, 2026, that threshold dropped to 181 days, a full 90 days earlier. For sellers who built their inventory cadence around a 9-month FBA runway, that's a significant change in the math.
The practical result is that inventory sent into FBA in November 2025, the typical pre-holiday restock, hit the 181-day mark right around the May 15 assessment. If you had products that didn't fully sell through the holiday season and you haven't cleared them since, they're now in surcharge territory and the bill is being posted this week.
The surcharge tiers escalate fast. From 181 to 210 days you're paying $0.50 per cubic foot per month on top of regular storage. By 241 to 270 days it jumps to $1.50 per cubic foot. From 271 to 300 days it hits $5.45 per cubic foot. Stock sitting past 365 days reaches $6.90 per cubic foot or $0.30 per unit, whichever is greater. That last tier isn't hypothetical: a brand with 200 units of a 0.15 cubic foot product at 365 days is paying roughly $207 a month just for the aged surcharge, on top of everything else.
How This Stacks on Top of the Other 2026 Fee Changes
The 181-day threshold change isn't the only cost pressure hitting FBA sellers this year. The 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge that took effect April 17 on core FBA, and May 2 on Multi-Channel Fulfillment and Buy with Prime, is still in effect. For a $15 fulfillment fee, that's an extra $0.53 per order. For a seller running 1,500 MCF orders a month, it's roughly $795 in new monthly cost that doesn't go away when the news cycle moves on.
Stacking aged inventory surcharges on top of the fuel surcharge on top of regular storage fees changes the unit economics for slow movers quickly. If 5% of your active SKUs are past 181 days, and your gross margin on those products is 20%, the combined fees can wipe out 35 to 50% of the gross profit on that subset in a single month. That math gets worse every month you don't act.
Our Amazon account management work includes regular fee audits at the ASIN level, specifically because these stacked changes have made it easy for a handful of slow-moving SKUs to quietly erode overall account margin in a way that doesn't show up clearly in a top-line revenue view.
What to Do Before June 15
The next assessment date is June 15. Removal orders submitted before June 14 will stop the surcharge clock for that cycle. Here's the short version of what to check this week.
Pull your FBA Inventory Age report from Seller Central (Reports, then Fulfillment, then Inventory Age). Sort by days in storage, descending. Focus on anything past 150 days, not just 181, because the window between action and effect is short. A unit at 165 days today will cross 181 before June 15 if it doesn't sell.
For anything past 181 days with slow projected sell-through, you have three options: run a price reduction or coupon to accelerate sell-through, submit a removal order to pull units back to a 3PL (which resets the aging clock when you eventually reship to FBA), or use Amazon's liquidation program for true dead stock. Removal to a 3PL and reship is generally the best option if you believe the product has future demand, because 3PL storage typically runs 30 to 60% cheaper than Amazon storage with no aging clock running.
If you're doing quarterly or semi-annual FBA replenishment, this year's changes are a strong argument for switching to 60 to 90 day shipment cycles. The shorter runway to surcharge territory means the old model of sending large seasonal batches and letting Amazon warehouse them is now materially more expensive than it used to be.
The Inventory This Is Hitting Hardest
Seasonal products are the highest-risk category. Anything that peaks in Q4 and has a long tail into Q1 and Q2 is now approaching or past 181 days if it wasn't cleared by February. Products with long lead times from overseas suppliers are in a tighter spot because the supply chain cycle doesn't compress easily even when the fee math changes.
Oversized items are hit harder than standard-size because the surcharge scales by cubic foot. A large, slow-moving product sitting past 271 days at $5.45 per cubic foot per month can accumulate charges that exceed the product's wholesale cost in a relatively short time.
Products in clothing, shoes, bags, jewelry, and watches are excluded from the 181 to 270 day surcharge tiers, which gives those categories a longer runway. Every other standard category is subject to the full schedule.
If you want to go through your FBA inventory report and work out the actual cost exposure on your catalog before the June 15 assessment, schedule a call with us. We can pull the numbers with you, identify which SKUs need action by June 14, and help you build a replenishment model that keeps you out of surcharge territory going forward.