In under a year, Amazon rewrote both halves of its FBA reimbursement bargain: how long you have to claim (18 months collapsed to 60 days) and how muchyou get back (your sale price replaced by your manufacturing cost). Each change shipped separately and quietly; together they moved real money from sellers' ledgers to Amazon's.
This page is the running timeline — dates, what each change actually says, and the specific defensive move for each. We update it whenever the policy moves again.
The timeline
| Effective | What changed | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-09-05 | Inbound shipment claims: 15–60 days from delivery | Missing-from-inbound units must be claimed no earlier than 15 and no later than 60 days after delivery, after the shipment shows Closed; one claim per shipment. |
| 2024-10-23 | All other claim windows: 18 months → 60 days | FC operations claims within 60 days of the loss/damage report; customer returns 60–120 days from refund; removal lost-in-transit 15–75 days from shipment creation. |
| 2024-11-01 | Proactive auto-reimbursement for FC-lost items | Amazon pays some warehouse losses automatically — at its estimate of your cost. Everything else still needs a manual claim. |
| 2025-03-31 | Reimbursement basis: sale price → manufacturing cost | Announced for 03-10, delayed to 03-31. Payouts now reflect your sourcing cost — up to ~60% lower on high-margin SKUs — with Amazon estimating the cost unless you enter your own. |
| 2026 — | No further changes as of July 2026 | This page is updated within days of any new announcement — check the date under the title. |
Change 1: the windows (September–October 2024)
The 18-month window rewarded procrastination; the 60-day regime punishes it irreversibly. The details that catch sellers out: the inbound clock starts at delivery, not check-in — and check-ins can take weeks; several windows also carry minimum waits (15 days inbound, 60 days for returns); and an expired claim has no appeal path. Full per-type table in the deadlines guide.
Defense: reconcile every shipment the week it closes, and put a countdown on every discrepancy. Monthly bookkeeping is now too slow for this job.
Change 2: proactive reimbursements (November 2024)
Sounds like a gift: Amazon automatically pays for items its warehouses lose. Two catches. It covers FC-lost only— inbound shortages, damage, and customer-return failures still require manual claims inside the 60-day windows. And it pays at Amazon's estimateof your cost, which — combined with change 3 below — sellers describe as "pennies on the dollar" on some SKUs. An auto-payment isn't a settled claim; it's a number worth auditing while the window is still open.
Defense: treat auto-reimbursements as line items to verify against your invoice cost, not as resolutions.
Change 3: manufacturing-cost payouts (March 2025)
The deepest cut. Reimbursements previously approximated your sale price; they now reflect your sourcing cost — explicitly excluding your margin, and in practice treated as excluding shipping, duties, and handling. On a unit that sells for $25 and sources for $10, the reimbursement roughly drops 60%.
Whose number? If you enter per-SKU costs in Seller Central's Manage Your Sourcing Costpage (in the Inventory Defect & Reimbursement portal), Amazon uses yours — subject to documentation if disputed. If you don't, Amazon estimates from "comparable products," and seller reports consistently describe those estimates as undervalued.
Defense: enter your real sourcing costs before Amazon guesses them, and keep the invoices that back the numbers. If you already track COGS for margin analysis (our true-profit tool does this per SKU), those are the same numbers — use them in the IDR portal too.
What's likely next
Nothing here suggests reversal. Each change shifted work and risk toward the seller, and the pattern — shorter windows, automated low-ball payouts, cost-basis values — points at more automation on Amazon's terms. Two rational responses: build the reconcile-and-file habit into every shipment close, and treat this page's next update as an action item, not news.
A note on who's telling you this: most policy explainers ranking for these terms are written by reimbursement services that charge 15–25% of whatever they recover. Their honest incentive is more claims through their pipeline. Ours is different — the scanner is free, filing is something you do yourself in minutes with prepared case text, and the paid product is just the watchdog that makes sure you never miss a window. You keep 100% of every reimbursement.
The windows will keep shrinking. The watchdog doesn't miss them.
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Related guides: Every FBA claim deadline in 2026 · Filing an inbound shipment claim, step by step