Amazon Shipping published its 2026 peak surcharges. Half of the merchant-fulfilled best sellers in bulky categories already sit in a size-surcharge tier

Amazon Shipping, the ground parcel service Amazon opened to all businesses this year, published its 2026 peak surcharges on September 2. Merchant-fulfilled sellers who label through it, and the larger group who ship with UPS and FedEx on schedules that Supply Chain Dive reports closely mirror it, now have the full peak calendar for both sides of the Amazon fee split. FBA’s holiday peak fulfillment fees start October 15. Amazon Shipping’s demand surcharges start October 25.

The headline numbers are small. The number that matters sits underneath them, and it is not new.

What Amazon Shipping announced

Three windows, four surcharge lines, amounts rising into the last five weeks before Christmas and easing after.

Surcharge	Oct 25 to Nov 21	Nov 22 to Dec 26	Dec 27 to Jan 16, 2027
Per-package demand surcharge	$0.50	$0.75	$0.50
Additional handling adder	$8.75	$11.90	$8.75
Large package adder	$96.25	$117.50	$96.25
Extra heavy package adder	$530	$590	$530

The surcharges apply automatically on top of contracted rates. There is no volume-based surcharge, which Amazon Shipping also skipped in 2025 and which UPS and FedEx both apply to larger shippers. Residential and weekend delivery stay free of surcharges.

Read the table carefully: only the first row is a flat fee on every parcel. The other three are adders. They increase a fee you were already paying, and that fee is defined in the Amazon Shipping service guide effective July 9, 2026, which is where the real cost lives.

The year-round fee table the adders sit on

Four size and weight tiers apply all year, priced by zone.

Tier	Trigger	Zone 2	Zones 3 to 4	Zone 5 and up
Non-standard	longest side over 37 in, or width over 30 in, or height over 24 in	$11.00	$12.25	$14.15
Additional handling, weight	scale weight over 50 lb	$45.89	$49.88	$55.20
Additional handling, dimensions	longest over 47 in, or width over 42 in, or girth over 105 in	$29.26	$32.59	$37.57
Additional handling, packaging	not fully encased in corrugated cardboard, shrink-wrapped, strapped, cylindrical, wheels or handles exposed	$25.94	$30.59	$32.59
Large package	girth over 130 in, or longest over 96 in; minimum billable weight 90 lb	$255.00	$275.00	$320.00
Extra heavy	over 150 lb, or girth over 165 in, or longest over 108 in	$1,875 flat

Girth is longest side plus twice the sum of the other two. Only one additional-handling fee applies per package, in the order weight, girth, length, width, packaging. A shipment can carry the non-standard fee and an additional-handling fee at the same time.

So a merchant-fulfilled desk frame that weighs 62 pounds pays $45.89 to $55.20 in additional handling on every parcel from January to December. Between November 22 and December 26 it pays $11.90 more for the tier plus $0.75 for the parcel: $12.65 of peak. The peak is a quarter of the base.

How much of the catalog this touches

We wanted the size of the exposed population, not an anecdote. On September 4 we pulled the 100 top-selling listings by ASIN-level monthly sales for each of 12 title keywords in Helium 10, restricted to listings with at least 30 parent-level sales a month: standing desk, dog crate, area rug, treadmill, patio furniture, kayak, bookshelf, trampoline, mattress, office chair, air fryer and yoga mat. That is 1,200 listings; 1,186 carry package weight and dimensions. For each we recorded the Buy Box fulfillment type and tested the package against the four thresholds above.

Who ships what. Amazon retail holds 21.0% of the listings, FBA 69.9%, merchant-fulfilled 9.1%. By units the split is sharper: merchant-fulfilled offers move 4.8% of the sample’s monthly units, Amazon retail 25.3%.

Keyword	Amazon retail	FBA	Merchant-fulfilled	Merchant-fulfilled share of units
Patio furniture	15	61	24	27.8%
Standing desk	11	65	24	17.7%
Treadmill	23	65	12	8.5%
Bookshelf	22	66	12	12.6%
Trampoline	7	82	11	9.6%
Office chair	24	65	11	8.4%
Yoga mat	51	43	6	3.6%
Kayak	9	88	3	2.4%
Air fryer	48	50	2	1.7%
Area rug	7	91	2	1.4%
Dog crate	13	86	1	0.5%
Mattress	22	77	1	0.6%
All 12	252	839	109	4.8%

Merchant fulfillment is a bulky-goods pattern. It is a quarter of the listings in standing desks and patio furniture and a rounding error in mattresses, air fryers, rugs and crates. Two of the keywords are misleading in a useful way: the kayak and mattress results are dominated by accessories, paddles, straps and toppers, which is exactly why they behave like small-parcel categories. The Buy Box on the actual boats and beds is mostly Amazon retail and FBA.

How many of those packages are already surcharged. Of the 95 merchant-fulfilled listings with package data, 47 cross at least one threshold. That is 49.5%. Twenty-seven, or 28.4%, trigger the additional-handling fee, and 44 of the 80 additional-handling packages in the whole sample get there on weight alone, over 50 pounds. Forty, or 42.1%, trigger the non-standard fee. One listing triggers both the large-package and extra-heavy tiers: a 90-pound patio set whose carton measures 60 by 50.5 by 40 inches, a girth of 241 inches.

Keyword	Merchant-fulfilled with package data	Any surcharge tier	Additional handling
Treadmill	9	9 (100.0%)	2 (22.2%)
Bookshelf	11	9 (81.8%)	0
Standing desk	23	14 (60.9%)	11 (47.8%)
Trampoline	10	6 (60.0%)	5 (50.0%)
Patio furniture	20	8 (40.0%)	8 (40.0%)
Office chair	10	1 (10.0%)	1 (10.0%)
Yoga mat, air fryer, kayak, mattress	12	0	0
All 12	95	47 (49.5%)	27 (28.4%)

Across the whole sample regardless of fulfillment, 13.0% of listings sit in a surcharge tier and 6.7% in additional handling. Weighted by units, 8.9% of monthly sales in these 12 categories ship in a surcharged box; in treadmills it is 50.5% and in standing desks 40.4%.

The tier is not a merchant-fulfilled problem. The 80 additional-handling packages split 24 Amazon retail, 29 FBA, 27 merchant-fulfilled. The box is the box. What changes with the fulfillment channel is which fee table prices it: FBA’s oversize and large bulky rate card with a $0.32 average holiday increase, or a carrier’s additional-handling schedule with an $8.75 to $11.90 holiday adder. For a bulky SKU both base rates are large, and the comparison has to be made fully loaded, per window, per unit.

What the numbers say to do

Two things follow from the data, and neither is “switch to FBA.”

First, the threshold edge is where the money is. The dimension trigger for additional handling is 47 inches; a 48-inch box pays $29.26 to $37.57 every time it ships and a 47-inch box pays nothing on that line. Twenty-five of the 36 dimension-triggered packages in our sample have a longest side of 47 to 52 inches, and another 40 listings across the sample sit within two inches or five pounds below a threshold. Some of those boxes cannot be shortened; a 55-inch desktop is 55 inches. The frame, the feet, the leg columns and the accessory bag usually can, and splitting a two-piece desk into two cartons moves both of them under the line.

Second, the peak adders reward moving ship dates by days, not weeks. The gap between the first window and the second is $3.15 per additional-handling package and $0.25 per parcel. On a 5,000-unit bulky SKU, shipping everything in the second window instead of the first costs $17,000 more in adders. That is real, but it is a fraction of the $229,450 to $276,000 the same 5,000 units pay in the weight-tier base fee across the year. Optimize the base fee first.

The Operator Read

If you ship merchant-fulfilled, the number you must model this week is not $0.75. It is the size and weight tier every SKU sits in today, because the peak adders are percentages of that tier, and because half of the merchant-fulfilled best sellers in bulky categories are already in one.

Do this in order. Classify every package against the four thresholds. Add the year-round tier fee to each SKU’s fulfillment line. Split forecast units into the three windows by ship date and add the window’s adders. Only then compare the total against the FBA rate for the same unit and the same week, with FBA’s own peak increase and the 3.5% fuel surcharge included. Anything within two inches or five pounds of a threshold goes on a re-boxing list, and anything shrink-wrapped, strapped or shipped with handles exposed goes on it first.

The fulfillment-channel decision for a bulky SKU is a unit-economics decision that changes by week in Q4. If you want a second set of eyes on the rate cards, size tiers and margin per window before the October 15 and October 25 lines, our listing audit includes the fee and size-tier review, and the pricing page shows what the full engagement costs.