Amazon Account Health Score: The Operator Guide (2026)

Your Amazon Account Health Rating is a 0-1000 score. Anything below 200 risks account deactivation. Most sellers only look at it after something goes wrong. By then, the fix takes weeks instead of hours.

Here is what the score is, what moves it, and how to stay well above the threshold.

What the Amazon Account Health Rating (AHR) Actually Is

Amazon introduced the Account Health Rating to give sellers a single number that represents overall account standing. It replaces the old system where you had to check a half-dozen separate dashboards and mentally synthesize your own risk level.

The AHR runs from 0 to 1,000. The bands:

• 200-1,000: Healthy. You have access to all account features, including the At-Risk Suspension Prevention support option where a dedicated team can help before suspension if a metric spikes.
• 100-199: At Risk. Amazon displays a warning. You lose access to the Suspension Prevention support. You need to fix the issues driving the score down before you drop further.
• Below 100: Unhealthy. Amazon can deactivate your selling account. The timeline before deactivation is not published and varies by account.

A low AHR also affects your Buy Box eligibility. If your account is sitting At Risk, your odds of winning the Buy Box on competitive ASINs drop even if your pricing and fulfillment are solid.

We monitor account health across 52 active client accounts at AMZ Advisers. The accounts that get into trouble are almost never the ones doing something obviously wrong. They're the ones that stopped looking.

The Metrics Behind the Score

Amazon builds your AHR from three metric categories. Understanding which category carries the most weight tells you where to focus.

Customer Service Performance (Highest Weight)

This section contains your Order Defect Rate (ODR). ODR is the most important number on the page. It measures the percentage of orders that resulted in any of these defects:

• An A-to-Z Guarantee Claim (filed by a buyer against the seller)
• A credit card chargeback
• Negative feedback (1 or 2 stars) that was not removed

Amazon's ODR target is under 1%. If you go above 1%, your account health drops immediately. Sustained ODR above 1% can result in selling privileges suspension independent of your AHR number. Even a brief spike to 1.5% across a 60-day order window can trigger a warning.

What actually drives ODR in practice: inaccurate product descriptions, condition complaints (especially on used/refurbished), FBM fulfillment errors, and product quality issues. The A-to-Z claims are the most damaging component because Amazon tends to decide in the buyer's favor, the refund comes out of your account, and the claim counts against ODR regardless of the outcome.

Shipping Performance (Moderate Weight)

Three metrics live here, all specific to Merchant-Fulfilled (FBM) orders. FBA orders are typically excluded because Amazon controls that fulfillment.

| Metric | Target Threshold | Amazon's Warning Level | |---|---|---| | Late Shipment Rate | Under 4% | Above 4% triggers warning | | Pre-Fulfillment Cancel Rate | Under 2.5% | Above 2.5% triggers warning | | Valid Tracking Rate | 95% or above | Below 95% triggers warning |

These metrics are calculated over a 10-day or 30-day rolling window depending on the metric. A bad week can move them quickly.

Pre-Fulfillment Cancel Rate is the one sellers underestimate. Every time you cancel an order because it is out of stock after the customer placed it, that counts. If you are running FBM with tight inventory, one stockout event can spike this metric above the threshold.

Policy Compliance (Significant Weight, Hard to Recover From)

This section lists every open violation on your account. Violations come in several types:

• Intellectual property (IP) complaints: A rights owner filed a claim that your listing infringes on a patent, trademark, or copyright. These carry heavy weight. See the Amazon restricted keywords and flagged listings guide for how these typically start and how appeals work.
• Product condition complaints: Buyers reported the item arrived not as described (used sold as new, damaged, wrong item).
• Authenticity complaints: Buyers or Amazon questioned whether the product is genuine.
• Listing policy violations: Prohibited content in titles, bullets, descriptions, or backend terms.
• Customer product reviews policy violations: Review manipulation, incentivized reviews, or seller-initiated contact to request reviews.

Unresolved violations are what bury accounts. Every open violation counts against your score. Disputed violations that are pending review still count while they are open. Speed matters.

The Full Metric Reference Table

| Metric | Target | Risk Threshold | Window | |---|---|---|---| | Order Defect Rate (ODR) | Under 1% | Above 1% | 60 days | | A-to-Z Claim Rate | Under 1% | Included in ODR | 60 days | | Chargeback Rate | Under 1% | Included in ODR | 60 days | | Negative Feedback Rate | As low as possible | Included in ODR | 60 days | | Late Shipment Rate | Under 4% | Above 4% | 10 days / 30 days | | Pre-Fulfillment Cancel Rate | Under 2.5% | Above 2.5% | 7 days / 30 days | | Valid Tracking Rate | 95%+ | Below 95% | 30 days | | On-Time Delivery Rate | 97%+ | Below 97% | 30 days |

The On-Time Delivery Rate (OTDR) is newer. Amazon started tracking it as a standalone metric and it feeds into Buy Box eligibility and program access (Prime Seller-Fulfilled, etc.) in addition to AHR. Sellers running FBM without reliable carrier tracking are most exposed here.

How to Read Your AHR in Seller Central

The Account Health dashboard is at Performance -> Account Health in Seller Central. Here is what to look at in order:

1. Your AHR score and color. Green means Healthy. Yellow means At Risk. Red means Unhealthy. The number matters more than the color -- a 210 and a 900 are both green but very different situations.
2. Policy Compliance section. Scroll to it immediately after seeing your score. Count the open violations. Each one has a status (Action Required, Under Review, Received). "Action Required" means you have not responded yet.
3. Customer Service Performance. Check your ODR percentage and the three sub-components (A-to-Z, chargebacks, negative feedback rate). If ODR is yellow or red, click through to the ASIN-level breakdown.
4. Shipping Performance. Check all three metrics for your FBM orders.

The dashboard is updated daily. The metrics reflect rolling windows, not calendar months. A metric can move into warning territory on a Tuesday and back into green by the following Monday if you fix the root cause fast enough.

How to Diagnose a Low AHR

If your score dropped, the cause is almost always one of three things:

A new Policy Compliance violation opened. Go to the Policy Compliance section and look for violations with a date in the last 7-14 days. IP complaints are the most common sudden-drop cause.

ODR spiked. Pull the Order Defect Rate report and sort by ASIN. If one or two ASINs are generating most of the defects, that is your problem. Look at the defect type -- A-to-Z claims point to fulfillment or product quality issues, negative feedback spikes sometimes trace to a listing description that is misleading buyers.

Shipping metrics moved into warning. Check your FBM order volume and whether any recent batch of orders had late shipments or cancellations. A slow holiday period or inventory miscalculation can spike these.

If your account score has been dropping slowly for weeks, check all three categories. Gradual drops are usually a combination of unresolved violations accumulating plus steady shipping performance that is just barely above the threshold.

A full Amazon account audit catches these issues before they compound -- we look at account health, policy compliance, listing quality, and PPC together because they interact. A listing that drives chargebacks hurts account health, which hurts Buy Box eligibility, which hurts ad performance.

How to Fix and Appeal Violations

Speed is the variable you control. Amazon does not reward perfect accounts. It rewards accounts that respond fast when something goes wrong.

For IP complaints (highest priority): Contact the rights owner directly if the complaint is a mistake. A rights owner retraction eliminates the violation from your count. If you cannot get a retraction, submit an appeal through the violation detail page with evidence of your authorization to sell the product (brand authorization letter, supplier invoice matching the ASIN, test reports). Amazon reviews IP appeals within 7-10 business days. Follow up every 5-7 days if you do not receive a response.

For product condition and authenticity complaints: Submit invoices from your supplier showing the product is genuine and new. Include your account name, the ASIN, and a description of your sourcing process. If the complaint is legitimate (product arrived damaged), fix the root cause in your packaging or FBM process and include a corrective action plan in your appeal.

For listing policy violations: Fix the listing first, then submit the appeal showing the correction. Appeals that show "I fixed the problem and here is proof" resolve faster than appeals that just dispute the violation without demonstrating any action.

For ODR from A-to-Z claims: You cannot remove legitimate A-to-Z claims from ODR. What you can do is fix the underlying issue so no new claims come in, and make sure any claims that are legitimately invalid (buyer filed after receiving the item, duplicate claim, etc.) are appealed through the standard A-to-Z appeal process.

Note: if you are seeing violations tied to keyword or content issues in your listings, the restricted keywords guide covers the specific fix process for content-based flags.

The Weekly Monitoring Cadence

The brands we manage that never have account health crises do one thing consistently: they check the dashboard every week, not every crisis.

A weekly account health check takes 10 minutes:

1. Open Account Health in Seller Central.
2. Check the AHR score. Did it move more than 50 points in either direction?
3. Scan Policy Compliance for any new violations this week.
4. Verify ODR is below 1% and no single ASIN has an A-to-Z rate above 0.5%.
5. Confirm all shipping metrics are green.

If everything is green, close the tab. If anything is yellow or new, address it the same day.

If you manage more than 10 ASINs or multiple seller accounts, consider the Account Health API (available through Seller Central's Selling Partner API). It lets you pull metric data programmatically so you can build a simple alert if any metric crosses a threshold. Worth the setup time once you are above 25-30 active SKUs.

Declining sales are often the first visible signal of an account health problem -- if your numbers are dropping and you are not sure why, the Amazon sales diagnostic and your Account Health dashboard should be the first two places you look.

The One Thing Most Sellers Get Wrong

They treat account health as a reactive dashboard. Something to check when the email comes from Amazon saying there is a problem.

By then, violations have already compounded, ODR has already been in the warning zone for 30+ days, and the fix requires a formal Plan of Corrective Action instead of a 15-minute response in Seller Central.

Account health is a leading indicator, not a lagging one. The score tells you where you are headed before Amazon takes action. That is the whole point of the dashboard.

Weekly checks. Fast responses. Root-cause fixes rather than appeals alone.

Those three habits keep an account in the Healthy range and out of the situation where you are scrambling to save selling privileges on accounts doing real revenue.

If you want a second set of eyes on your account health setup, or you are coming out of a violation period and want to make sure nothing is still open, the Amazon audit covers account health as a core component alongside listing quality, PPC efficiency, and fee structure.

The weekly compliance patterns, what violations we are seeing across our account base, and what changed in Amazon's enforcement goes out in the newsletter. Worth following if account health is something you want to stay ahead of.