Amazon FBA Reimbursements: What You're Actually Owed

Amazon FBA reimbursement claims used to have an 18-month window. As of late 2024, you have 60 days from the event for most lost or damaged inventory claims. If you're not reconciling your account monthly, you're not catching these. That's the short version. Here's what's actually claimable, what the real window is now, and which categories almost nobody checks.

What You Can Actually Claim

Amazon FBA reimbursement covers three distinct categories, and they don't all work the same way.

Lost or damaged warehouse inventory. Units that go missing inside a fulfillment center, get crushed on a conveyor, or show up broken during a warehouse transfer. This is the category most sellers associate with "amazon fba lost inventory reimbursement," and it's the one Amazon now handles proactively for a lot of events. Not all of them.

Destroyed or disposed customer returns. A customer sends a product back, Amazon inspects it, decides it's not resellable, and disposes of it instead of returning it to your inventory or crediting you. If Amazon destroyed a unit without reimbursing you for it, that's a claim. This is the category we see unclaimed most often, because it doesn't show up as a loss on the surface. It shows up as a return that quietly disappeared.

Fee overcharges. Amazon calculates referral fees, FBA fulfillment fees, and storage fees based on your listing's weight and dimensions. When Amazon's measured weight or size tier doesn't match what you were actually charged for, or when a referral fee rate was applied incorrectly for your category, the difference is reimbursable. This is the category almost nobody checks, because it never gets framed as a "reimbursement" problem. It gets filed away as "the fees are just high this month."

What's not in this list: chargebacks for your own fulfillment errors, normal return processing fees, or anything you're responsible for. Amazon reimburses its own mistakes. It does not reimburse yours.

The Claim Window Shrank. A Lot.

For years, FBA sellers worked with an 18-month lookback on lost and damaged inventory claims. That changed. Amazon's own seller forum policy update set new eligibility windows that took effect October 23, 2024, and they are much tighter than what came before.

Miss the window and the claim is gone. There's no appeal process for a late filing on a routine loss event. This is why "I'll deal with reimbursements at year-end" doesn't work anymore. By year-end, most of the year's events have already fallen out of eligibility.

The one piece of good news: starting November 1, 2024, Amazon began proactively reimbursing many lost and damaged warehouse inventory events without requiring a manual claim. That covers a real chunk of the lost-inventory category. It does not cover destroyed returns, and it does not cover fee overcharges. Those two categories still require someone to actually go look.

There's also a valuation change worth knowing before you estimate what you're owed. As of March 10, 2025, Amazon reimburses inventory lost or damaged before a customer order at your manufacturing cost, defined as what you actually paid to source or produce the unit, excluding shipping, duties, and handling. Inventory lost or damaged after a customer placed an order is still reimbursed at the sale price minus applicable fees. That's a meaningful difference if your margin per unit is wide. It means the dollar value of a pre-order warehouse loss is smaller than it used to be, even though the loss itself is just as real.

Why This Doesn't Just Happen Automatically

Automatic reimbursement sounds like it should close the gap. It doesn't, for a simple reason: Amazon's system can only reimburse what it can detect and match against its own records. Destroyed returns and fee miscalculations aren't loss events in Amazon's warehouse-tracking sense. They're accounting discrepancies buried in a reconciliation report, and nobody reconciles automatically on your behalf.

That's the real divide. Lost-in-warehouse events are now mostly a system problem Amazon has incentive to clean up, because it's the kind of error that shows up in their own operational metrics. Fee overcharges and return destruction are a your-business problem. Amazon isn't going to flag that it charged you the wrong referral fee rate. You have to find that yourself, in the Fee Preview reports and the Returns dashboard, inside a 60-day window that started the day the error happened, not the day you noticed it.

This is the same dynamic I've written about with the FBA fuel surcharge and the broader fee creep eating into seller margins: Amazon's fee structure keeps adding complexity, and complexity is where money gets lost on both sides of the ledger. The surcharge post covers what you're paying. This one covers what you're owed back.

The Categories Most Agencies Never Check

Most sellers, and most agencies, stop at lost and damaged inventory because it's the obvious one. Three categories get skipped consistently:

Weight and dimension discrepancies. If Amazon's system measured your product's shipping weight or size tier incorrectly, every single unit sold since that measurement was logged has been overcharged on fulfillment fees. This isn't a one-time event. It's a recurring overcharge until someone catches it and Amazon corrects the listing.

Inbound shipment shortages. When a shipment leaves your warehouse with 500 units and only 480 get checked in at the fulfillment center, that 20-unit gap is a claim, not a rounding error. It requires comparing your shipment manifest against the receive confirmation, which almost nobody does unless they're specifically looking for it.

Duplicate or reversed reimbursements. Less common, but real: Amazon occasionally reimburses an event and then reverses the credit in a later settlement period without a clear explanation. If you're not tracking reimbursement line items against the original event, a clawback can slide through unnoticed.

None of these show up if you're only glancing at your settlement report totals. They show up when someone pulls the Reimbursements Report and the Inventory Ledger side by side and actually checks the line items against what should have happened.

How to Actually File a Claim

The process is the same regardless of category, it's just a matter of knowing where to look.

1. Pull the right report. Reports > Fulfillment > Inventory Adjustments for lost/damaged events, or the Reimbursements Report for anything Amazon has already processed. Filter for unresolved discrepancies, not just completed reimbursements.
2. Confirm the event and the date. You need the exact date of the loss, damage, or discrepancy to know whether you're still inside the window. This is why monthly reconciliation matters more than it used to. A quarterly check now routinely misses events that fell outside 60 days before you even looked.
3. Open a case through Seller Support. Help > Get Support > Selling on Amazon > Fulfillment by Amazon, and select the specific issue type. Vague case descriptions get bounced back for more detail, which burns days you don't have inside a 60-day window.
4. Attach documentation. Shipment manifests, receive confirmations, screenshots of the discrepancy. Amazon has tightened documentation requirements alongside the shorter windows, so a thin case gets rejected faster than it used to.
5. Track it to resolution. Claims sit in a queue. If you don't follow up, some get closed without payment and nobody notices until the next full reconciliation, by which point other events in the same window have already aged out.

If this sounds like a process that needs to run every month rather than once a year, that's correct. It's also exactly the kind of thing that gets skipped when sales are flat and the team is focused on figuring out why Amazon sales are down instead of the quieter margin leak sitting in the reconciliation reports.

What This Is Actually Worth Checking

I'm not going to hand you a recovery-rate percentage, because I don't have a number I'd trust enough to publish, and neither does anyone else writing about this. What I can tell you from running accounts day to day: the three categories above don't check themselves, the window is real and it's short, and the accounts that reconcile monthly catch things the accounts that reconcile at tax time simply never will, because the claim is already closed by the time anyone looks.

A reimbursement check is one piece of a broader account review, not a replacement for one. If you want the full picture of what we check before taking on an account, not just the fee-recovery piece, that's covered in what an Amazon account audit actually checks.

The fee structure is not going to get simpler. Every added surcharge and every new size tier is another place a number can be wrong in Amazon's favor instead of yours. Checking for that isn't aggressive. It's just closing the loop on money that was already yours.

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