Amazon FBA reimbursement window cut from 18 months to 60 days — audit yours this week
Amazon quietly shrank the FBA reimbursement claim window from 18 months to 60 days. Typical FBA sellers leave 1–3% of annual revenue unclaimed. Here's the 3-step audit for the last 60 days.
By WAYAMZ Team
FBA warehouses quietly owe most sellers money every single month. Lost units, damaged units, weight-and-dimension mismeasurements, returns that were received but never made it back into sellable inventory — all of it is supposed to be reimbursable.
For years, the manual-claim window was 18 months. You could run an audit twice a year and still catch most of it.
As of 2026, that window is 60 days. Anything older than that, Amazon won’t process, even if the loss is obvious and documented.
FBM sellers had the same squeeze: the SAFE-T claim window dropped from 60 days to 30 days on February 8.
Four categories most sellers leave money in
Inside the FBA network, these are the reimbursement buckets that actually matter:
- Lost in warehouse — Amazon’s records show the unit arrived but can’t locate it
- Damaged in warehouse — unit was received intact, damaged during storage/pick
- Inbound dimension or weight discrepancy — measurement error at the receive dock leads to higher fulfillment fees going forward (recoverable if caught)
- Return discrepancy — buyer returned the item, Amazon logged the return, the unit never made it back to your sellable stock
The scale of what’s unclaimed
Industry data that lines up with what we see on new accounts: typical FBA sellers leave 1–3% of annual revenue in unclaimed reimbursements.
- $500K annual revenue → $5,000–$15,000 left on the table
- $1M annual revenue → $10,000–$30,000 left on the table
Most sellers never run this audit. The ones who do, most of them are doing it once a year — which under the new rules now means they can only claim the last 60 days of a 12-month period.
The 3-step Seller Central audit for this week
Run this once. Then bake it into a weekly SOP, because the window is now 60 days.
1. Lost Inventory report (last 60 days). Seller Central → Reports → Fulfillment → Inventory → Lost Inventory. Filter to the last 60 days. Any units in this report that haven’t been auto-reimbursed get a manual claim opened.
2. Inventory Adjustments report — reason codes E and M. Same reports menu → Inventory Adjustments. Filter to the last 60 days, reason code E (damaged in warehouse) and reason code M (missing). These are your warehouse-side loss events. Cross-check against auto-reimbursements; file claims for anything not already settled.
3. Inbound vs sellable quantity reconciliation. For each shipment received in the last 60 days: compare units shipped per Amazon’s receive report against units that actually became sellable inventory. Non-trivial gaps are recoverable losses. Open a claim with the FBA shipment ID and the reconciliation math.
What the workflow can look like at scale
Manual reconciliation across hundreds of SKUs takes 1–2 days of analyst time per audit cycle. What we do for operating accounts:
- Pull the three reports automatically via scheduled export
- Run a diff script that matches received-vs-sellable and flags discrepancies
- Generate a claim package (shipment ID, SKU, quantity, delta, reason code) per case
- Human review for edge cases, one-click submit the rest
At a rough 20 minutes of agent-run time per audit, a weekly cadence is realistic. Monthly at worst.
The read
Even if you don’t want to build any of this infrastructure, run the manual 3-step audit this week. Whatever was unclaimed in the last 60 days is still recoverable. Anything older is gone under the new rule.