Amazon FBA Reimbursements How to Recover the Money Amazon Owes You

The urgency is new, and it is the reason most reimbursement guides still online are wrong. Claims used to stay open for 18 months, so a relaxed quarterly clean-up caught everything. That era ended. Amazon shortened the windows dramatically, most recently on October 15, 2025, and changed how it values many claims. This guide gives you the current rules, the common issues to audit, how to file, and the monthly routine that keeps your money from expiring.

An FBA reimbursement is money Amazon returns to you when something in its fulfillment operation goes wrong at your expense. You shipped inventory in and the warehouse received fewer units than you sent. A unit was damaged inside a fulfillment center. A customer was refunded but never sent the item back. A fee was calculated on the wrong dimensions. In each case, Amazon's records and your records disagree, and the difference is money you are owed.

Some of these get reimbursed automatically. Since November 1, 2024, Amazon has proactively reimbursed many units lost inside a fulfillment center, issuing the credit as soon as the item is reported lost. That automation is genuinely useful, but it is not a reason to switch off, because it does not fire in every case. Automatic reimbursements still need to be reconciled against your own records to confirm that eligible units and reimbursement amounts were handled correctly. Where the automation fails to fire, a manual claim is still yours to file, inside the window.

Two changes reset this entire topic, and most articles still ranking on the subject were written against the old rules.

The shortened windows.

Amazon replaced the old 18-month lookback with much shorter, claim-type-specific windows, and updated them again effective October 15, 2025. The clock generally starts on the reporting or refund date in Amazon's system, not the day you notice the problem, which quietly eats part of your window before you begin.

The valuation change.

Effective March 10, 2025, Amazon changed how it values FBA inventory lost or damaged before a customer order, basing those reimbursements on manufacturing cost rather than the previous methodology. Inventory lost or damaged after a customer has ordered it is generally still valued closer to the sale price minus Amazon fees. This distinction matters, and most guides flatten it.

Amazon's manufacturing-cost definition is narrower than your full landed cost. It covers the cost to source the product from a manufacturer, wholesaler, or reseller, or to produce it yourself, and it excludes shipping, handling, customs duties, and other downstream costs. If your per-unit cost fields in Seller Central are blank, Amazon substitutes its own estimate, which tends to sit lower than what you actually paid.

These reflect Amazon's rules as of the October 15, 2025 update. Because Amazon has revised them more than once, treat the version inside your own Seller Central as binding and confirm before you rely on any figure.

These are the recurring problems worth auditing for. They map to different Amazon claim processes and different deadlines, so filing the wrong way, or at the wrong time, gets a claim rejected.

Lost Inventory

Inventory that entered Amazon's system and then vanished. It appears in three places: inbound, where fewer units were received than you shipped; inside the warehouse, where units are marked lost or misplaced after check-in; and after a return, where a unit was scanned back but never restocked to your available inventory. Fulfillment-center lost claims generally run within 60 days of the loss being reported. The inbound variety is one of the most common and most overlooked, because the shortfall often appears weeks after the shipment closed.

Damaged Inventory

Units damaged inside a fulfillment center by Amazon's handling, rather than by a customer, are reimbursable within roughly 60 days of the damage being reported. The report to watch is Inventory Adjustments, filtered for the warehouse-damage reason codes.

Fee Overcharges

Amazon calculates referral and fulfillment fees from a product's recorded dimensions and weight. When those measurements are wrong, and dimension and weight errors recur constantly, you are overcharged on every unit that sells until it is corrected. These compound silently: a few cents of overcharge on a high-velocity ASIN becomes real money over a quarter. Fee disputes tend to take longer to resolve than inventory claims.

Return Discrepancies

Two patterns dominate: a customer is refunded but never returns the item, and a return comes back but is never restocked to sellable inventory. Customer-return claims carry the most counter-intuitive rule in the system. There is a waiting period: Amazon will not accept the claim before day 45 after the refund or replacement, because the customer still has time to return the item, and the window closes at day 105. File before day 45 and it is rejected; file after day 105 and it is gone. The correct behavior is to wait, then file inside the 45-to-105-day window.

Open the relevant reimbursement workflow in Seller Central and select the issue type that matches the discrepancy. Before you file, gather the identifiers Amazon needs to locate the transaction, because a case without them usually stalls.

You will want the ASIN and FNSKU, the shipment ID where relevant, and the specific date range of the discrepancy. Pull the supporting report that shows the problem, most often the Inventory Adjustments report, and cross-reference the Reimbursements report to see what has already been paid. File one case per issue type; bundling multiple discrepancy types into a single case slows resolution and often results in partial closure. If the claim is a lost-or-damaged case being valued at manufacturing cost, attach your supplier invoices, since without your own substantiated cost Amazon calculates the payout from its internal estimate, which tends to sit lower than what you paid.

If a case is denied, do not treat that as final, particularly a customer-return case rejected for being filed too early; that is a signal to put it on a watch-list and re-file inside the correct window. For the current official deadlines and process, check Amazon's FBA lost and damaged inventory reimbursement policy in Seller Central.

This is the section worth bookmarking, because under the current windows a repeatable rhythm is the whole game. With fulfillment-center claims expiring around 60 days from the reporting date, the shorter windows make a consistent monthly, or more frequent, reconciliation routine far more important than the occasional quarterly or annual audit.

Set a fixed recurring appointment, not a "when I have time" task, because with these windows regularity is half the recovery. Then, each cycle: pull the Inventory Adjustments report and filter for the lost and damaged warehouse reason codes. Reconcile inbound shipments, comparing units shipped against units received, since inbound shortfalls are among the most common and most missed. Cross-check returns against refunds to catch customers refunded without returning, and returns that came back but were never restocked. Spot-check fee measurements on your top ASINs, since a dimension error there overcharges every unit. Put customer-return discrepancies on a dated watch list and file eligible claims once the 45-day waiting period has passed, before the 105-day deadline. Finally, log every case you submit with its date and reference, so the next cycle's cross-check is clean.

Three native Seller Central reports carry this routine: the Inventory Ledger for the full picture of stock movement, Inventory Adjustments for the losses and damage that generate claims, and the Reimbursements report to confirm what has already been paid so you only chase what is genuinely outstanding. One prerequisite makes it all work under the current valuation model: keep your per-unit cost of goods current in Seller Central for every active SKU, because a blank field defaults to Amazon's lower estimate on every cost-based claim.

There are three honest ways to handle FBA reimbursements, and the right one depends on your time, your SKU count, and your tolerance for missed windows.

Do it yourself.

The lowest direct cost and the highest internal workload. Every report you need is native to Seller Central, so for a small catalog with a disciplined weekly slot it is entirely doable. The risk is not cost; it is consistency. Miss a week or two during a busy stretch and eligible cases expire permanently under the current windows.

Software.

Automates discrepancy detection and monitoring, which solves the consistency problem. Pricing and the degree of claim-management involvement vary by provider, so compare how each handles filing, documentation, and denials before committing.

Managed service.

Adds human review and case management, writing the cases with documentation and working denials through appeal. Pricing may be contingency-based or fixed depending on the provider. For sellers with a large catalog or no internal reconciliation habit, this is often where the math lands, because the alternative is not "free," it is the silent loss of claims that expired unfiled.

CMO uses a no-win-no-fee model. Across 16 years and more than $300M in managed marketplace revenue, our team of over 60 specialists handles reimbursement reconciliation as a standing discipline rather than an occasional audit, so you pay only when eligible funds are recovered. You can see the full scope on our Amazon reimbursement service page, and how it fits into a completely managed account through full service management.