When Is the Next Amazon Prime Day? Dates and Deadlines

Amazon has not announced Prime Day 2027. If you are planning around it, that is the honest answer, and anyone giving you a specific date right now is guessing.

What you can plan around is the pattern. Nine of the twelve Prime Days Amazon has run since 2015 landed in July, and Amazon normally confirms the exact dates only two to four weeks before the event. Prime Day 2026 ran June 23-26, so late June is in range too. Either way the shopping dates are not the ones that decide whether you can participate.

Updated October 8, 2026: this post used to be a Q4 2026 calendar. It is now the standing version, written to be read in any part of the cycle rather than rebuilt every year. The 2026 figures below are kept because they are the most recent measured ones, and they are labelled as such.

I manage 85+ Amazon accounts through AMZ Commerce Advisers. Across every one of these events, the sellers who do well are not the ones with the deepest discount. They are the ones who submitted on time, sequenced their events on purpose, and priced against the current fee stack instead of last year's. Here is the calendar that actually matters, the one mechanic almost nobody uses correctly, and the fee math that changes what a "good" discount looks like.

The Date That Matters Is Not the Shopping Date

Sellers plan around the event dates. They should plan around the submission dates, because those are the ones that eliminate options if you miss them.

The shape repeats every year. Amazon opens deal submissions months ahead, closes the window weeks ahead of the event, and offers a discount on the promotion fee for submitting early that expires well before the window itself closes. Three separate dates, and only one of them is the one everybody writes down.

Measured on the 2026 cycle, which is the most recent complete one: submissions opened July 8. Prime Big Deal Days ran October 6-7, with submissions closing September 8 and the $50 early-bird discount requiring entry by August 5. Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday submissions closed October 20, with the same $50 early-bird discount expiring September 5. So the earliest real deadline on the whole calendar was in early August, two months before the first event.

Read those gaps rather than the dates. The early-bird cutoff sat roughly two months before its event. The submission close sat roughly four weeks before. If 2027 follows the same shape, the action you need to take for a July event is due in spring, not in June.

Getting a deal approved is only half of it. The other half is getting inventory in position to carry the Prime badge during the event, and that runs on a completely different clock with its own dates by shipment method. I broke that calendar down separately in Amazon's FBA inventory deadlines, because the two clocks do not move together and missing either one costs you the event on its own terms.

If you have not touched prep beyond noting a date, the Prime Day seller checklist walks the inventory, listing and ad-readiness framework that applies to every Amazon sales event, not just one of them.

The Price Lookback Mechanic Most Sellers Get Backwards

Here is the part that actually changes how you should price, and it is the reason this post exists.

Amazon caps how deep a deal you can run by checking your price history. Before approving a Lightning Deal or Prime Exclusive Discount, it looks back over a 30 to 60 day window and uses the lowest price in that window to calculate your maximum allowed discount. Run a deep discount in one event, and Amazon's system sees that low price sitting in your recent history when you submit for the next one. The deeper you went the first time, the less room the lookback gives you the second time, because "deep" is measured against a price you already dropped to.

That mechanic is why a lot of operators price their first event of the season conservatively on purpose, worried that a strong discount will box them into a weaker one later. The instinct is reasonable. It is also the thing to check before you act on it, because Amazon has carved out exceptions.

For the 2026 cycle it carved out a specific one: promotional prices run during Prime Big Deal Days were excluded from the lookback window used to calculate the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deal price cap. The two events were evaluated independently instead of the second being penalised by the first. Sellers who held October back to protect November gave up margin for a problem Amazon had already solved.

The practical move, in any year: find out whether an exclusion applies to your two events before you decide how deep to go on the first one. If it does, price each event on its own merits, on what moves inventory and ranking for that specific event. If it does not, sequence deliberately and treat your first discount as spending part of your second one. Do not carry an assumption from one year into the next. The exclusion above was announced for a specific cycle, not established as policy.

The Fee Stack That Lands on the October Event

Getting the dates and the lookback right still is not the whole picture, because the cost side moves too, and it moves asymmetrically between the two events.

Amazon runs a peak fulfillment surcharge across the back half of Q4. On the 2026 cycle it ran October 15, 2026 through January 14, 2027, averaging $0.32 per unit, and it stacked on top of the 3.5% fuel and inflation surcharge that had applied to every FBA unit since April. The trigger is ship date, not order date, so a unit that shipped October 16 ate the peak fee even if the order came in before the window opened.

That window is the asymmetry worth planning around. It covers the October event, the entire Black Friday and Cyber Monday shipping surge and the full December push. It does not cover the summer Prime Day. So the same discount depth carries a different per-unit cost depending on which of the two events you run it in, and a plan that treats them as interchangeable is pricing one of them wrong.

I broke down the exact per-tier math, the combined per-unit cost on standard, large standard and oversize product, in the full fuel and peak surcharge breakdown. The point for this post: whatever margin you penciled a deal against, run it again against the fee stack that will be live on the ship date, not the one that was live when you built the model.

A deal that looked margin-positive at a 3.5% surcharge can be margin-negative once an additional $0.32 per unit lands during the exact weeks your promotion drives the highest volume of the year. Amazon's effective take rate across referral fees, fulfillment, storage and advertising sat around 34% in 2026, up from 26% in 2020, and the October event is where that creep compounds hardest because volume peaks right when the fee stack is heaviest. The year-by-year version of that number is in the full margin breakdown.

A Sequencing Framework That Survives the Calendar Changing

Put the submission gaps, the lookback and the fee asymmetry together and the sequencing writes itself, in any year, whatever the announced dates turn out to be.

Walking the logic:

Find the early-bird cutoff first, not the event date. It is the earliest date on the calendar that has a price attached, and it is the one most sellers discover after it has passed. On the 2026 cycle it saved $50 per deal. Across a handful of ASINs that is real money for a few minutes in Seller Central.

Check the lookback rules for your specific pair of events before pricing either. This is the single highest-leverage thing in this post, and it changes between cycles.

Reprice against the fee stack that will be live when the unit ships. Not the one from when you modeled it. For an October event that means including the peak surcharge. For a summer event it means not including it, and not inflating your price as though it applied.

Position inventory ahead of the ship window. Fees and deadlines aside, the sellers who lose the most money in an event lose it by going out of stock mid-event, not by mispricing a deal.

Expect a soft week on either side of the event, and do not react to it. Shoppers hold purchases in the week before and are already stocked up in the week after, so your daily chart dips twice around the spike. Both dips are the calendar, not a broken listing. If you want to confirm which you are looking at before cutting price or ad budget, the Amazon sales-down diagnostic has the year-over-year overlay that separates an event trough from a real decline.

What To Do Before the Next One Is Announced

You cannot submit a deal for an event Amazon has not opened. You can do the three things that are late by the time the dates land.

Know which of your ASINs are deal-eligible, because eligibility checks catch people out after the window opens and there is no time to fix a listing. Model your margin at the fee stack you expect on the ship date, so the discount depth is a decision rather than a reaction. And get the inventory question answered early, since the fulfillment clock starts before the submission clock ends.

When Amazon does announce, the useful move is not to write the date down. It is to work backwards from it to the early-bird cutoff, which on recent form sits about two months earlier.

We run this calendar and the fee-stack math across 85+ Amazon accounts every cycle. If you want someone to check your pricing against the live fee stack before you submit, request a free Amazon audit and we will walk through it. And if the same margin questions keep surfacing cycle after cycle, that is usually a sign it is worth a conversation about ongoing account management instead of solving it deal by deal.

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