The single most expensive misconception in FBA right now is a date. Many sellers still believe the Amazon reimbursement time limit is 18 months — because for years, it was. Since October 23, 2024, that hasn't been true. Most manual claims now expire in 60 days, and every event older than that is money you can no longer get back.
- Before October 23, 2024, sellers had 18 months to file manual reimbursement claims. Amazon cut the windows by roughly 90% — most claims now expire in 60 days.
- Every claim type runs on its own clock: FC lost/damaged (0–60 days from report), customer returns (60–120 days after refund), removals lost in transit (15–75 days), other removals (60 days from delivery), inbound (about 60 days once eligible).
- Industry audits consistently find sellers leak 1–3% of annual revenue to unclaimed discrepancies — and under the new windows, roughly a month's worth of that leak expires every month you don't audit.
- An annual audit now arrives too late for ~10 months of 60-day claims. Monthly auditing is the only cadence that keeps everything in-window.
- Since March 10, 2025, pre-order losses are reimbursed at manufacturing cost — a second reason recoveries shrink when you wait.
From 18 Months to 60 Days: What Changed in October 2024
For most of FBA's history, reimbursement deadlines were forgiving. A unit crushed in a fulfillment center in January could still be claimed the following summer. Sellers built their habits around that slack: audit once a year, batch up the claims, file them all in a week.
Effective October 23, 2024, Amazon rewrote its FBA reimbursement policy and slashed the eligibility windows by roughly 90%. The 18-month window is gone. In its place is a set of per-category deadlines, most of which close at day 60.
Amazon paired the change with a promise: it now "proactively reimburses" most warehouse lost/damaged cases and many customer-return cases automatically. That promise is real but incomplete. In practice, automation misses units — mismatched quantities, partial reimbursements, values that are too low, and events that simply never trigger a case. Under the old rules, you had a year and a half to catch what automation missed. Now you have about two months.
The result is a quiet structural change: the seller who audits on the old schedule loses almost everything, without ever seeing a rejection notice. Expired claims don't generate an alert. They just stop being claimable.
The New Amazon Reimbursement Time Limits, Category by Category
Here is every current FBA claim window on a single 120-day axis. Each bar shows when the window opens and closes; the red edge is the point of no return. Note that two of these windows don't start at day zero — you can file too early as well as too late.
Each bar's clock starts from a different trigger event — not from a calendar date. Inbound eligibility depends on shipment status after delivery and Amazon's receiving/reconciliation period.
The same deadlines in table form, with the detail that trips sellers up — the trigger event that starts each clock:
| Claim type | Window opens | Window closes | Clock starts from |
|---|---|---|---|
| FC lost or damaged | Day 0 | Day 60 | Date the item is reported lost or damaged |
| FBA customer returns | Day 60 | Day 120 | Customer refund or replacement date |
| Removals lost in transit | Day 15 | Day 75 | Removal shipment creation date |
| All other removal claims | Day 0 | Day 60 | Shipment delivered back to you |
| Inbound shipment claims | When eligible | ≈ 60 days later | Shipment becomes eligible for investigation |
| Fee disputes (weight/dims) | Day 0 | ≈ Day 90 | Re-measurement request; roughly 90 days historically |
Two patterns are worth memorizing. First, most windows close at 60 days — that's the working Amazon reimbursement deadline for planning purposes. Second, the customer-returns window is inverted: because customers get about 30 days to send an item back (and Amazon allows 60 before the unit is considered unreturned), you cannot file before day 60. If a refunded unit never comes back and never gets restocked, your FBA claim window is days 60–120 — a window that both opens and closes while most sellers aren't looking. We cover that leak in detail in Returns Not Restocked: FBA's Single Biggest Reimbursement Leak.
If your last full reimbursement audit was more than 60 days ago, some of your claims have already expired — silently. Amazon doesn't notify you when a window closes; the event simply stops being claimable. Everything older than the window is gone, and everything approaching it is on a countdown.
What Waiting Costs You, Month by Month
Industry audits consistently find that FBA sellers lose 1–3% of annual revenue to unclaimed discrepancies — lost inbound units, warehouse damage, returns never restocked, removal losses, fee overcharges. (The full math is in How Much Does Amazon Owe Me?)
Under the old 18-month regime, that leak accumulated but stayed recoverable. Under the new amazon reimbursement time limit, it doesn't. Because most windows run about 60 days, roughly 1/12 of your annual leak crosses its deadline every month you don't audit. The numbers below are illustrative — your actual leak depends on volume, category, and prep — but the scale is right:
| Monthly revenue | Annual revenue | Annual leak (1–3%) | Expiring each month you wait |
|---|---|---|---|
| $10,000 | $120,000 | $1,200 – $3,600 | $100 – $300 |
| $30,000 | $360,000 | $3,600 – $10,800 | $300 – $900 |
| $100,000 | $1,200,000 | $12,000 – $36,000 | $1,000 – $3,000 |
| $500,000 | $6,000,000 | $60,000 – $180,000 | $5,000 – $15,000 |
Read the last column as a subscription you're paying in reverse. A seller doing $100k/month who skips auditing for a quarter doesn't lose "some" claims — they let roughly $3,000–$9,000 in recoverable discrepancies cross the line into unclaimable, permanently. Waiting used to cost interest. Now it costs principal.
Why Your Audit Cadence Must Be Monthly Now
The audit schedule that made sense in 2023 is now a money shredder. Think about what each cadence means for a claim type with a 60-day window:
- Annual audit: when you finally sit down, only the last ~2 months of events are still claimable. Roughly ten months of discrepancies have already expired.
- Quarterly audit: better, but the first month of every quarter is already past day 60 by the time you audit. You're structurally writing off about a third of your 60-day claims.
- Monthly audit: every event is caught well inside its window — including the customer-returns window that doesn't even open until day 60.
| Audit cadence | Oldest event at audit time | 60-day claims still in-window | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annually | ~12 months | ~2 of 12 months (~17%) | ~10 months of claims already expired |
| Quarterly | ~3 months | ~2 of 3 months (~67%) | Still losing roughly a third |
| Monthly | ~1 month | All (~100%) | Everything caught in-window |
These percentages are illustrative — they assume discrepancies occur evenly through the year — but the direction is unavoidable: any cadence slower than monthly guarantees expired claims. And note the flip side for returns: a monthly audit is also the only realistic way to catch return claims in their day 60–120 window without a dedicated tracker, because at annual or quarterly cadence many of those windows have both opened and closed between audits.
If you're doing this manually, the practical move is simple: put a recurring "reimbursement audit day" on your calendar — the 1st of every month — and work through your Inventory Ledger, returns report, and removal orders while everything is still fresh. If that sounds like a lot of spreadsheet time, it is; we compare the real hours in DIY vs. Software vs. Agency: The Real Cost of FBA Reimbursement Recovery.
The Second Clock: March 2025's Manufacturing-Cost Change
Deadlines aren't the only way waiting shrinks your recovery. Effective March 10, 2025 (US), Amazon changed how much it pays for inventory lost or damaged before a customer order: reimbursement is now based on manufacturing cost — your product cost excluding shipping, duties, and handling — rather than the sale price. Items lost or damaged after a customer order are still reimbursed at the sale price minus fees.
Here's the catch: unless you upload your actual cost data, Amazon uses its own "estimated manufacturing cost." If that estimate runs low, every pre-order reimbursement you receive is quietly undersized — and if you only review reimbursements once a year, you won't notice until months of underpayments have accumulated on top of months of expired claims.
Upload your real manufacturing costs in Seller Central so Amazon can't default to its own estimate. It's a one-time fix that raises the value of every future pre-order reimbursement — automated or manual. Full details in our plain-English policy guide.
What a Real Deadline System Tracks
Notice what the timeline above actually demands. There is no single "Amazon reimbursement deadline" you can put on a sticky note — there are five-plus clocks, each starting from a different trigger event, some with windows that open late. A system that actually protects you has to track, per event, not per month:
The trigger date for every event type
The report date for FC damage, the refund date for returns, the shipment-creation date for in-transit removals, the delivery date for other removals, the eligibility date for inbound shipments.
The open date — not just the close date
Return claims filed before day 60 and in-transit removal claims filed before day 15 are premature. A good system queues them and files the moment the window opens.
Whether auto-reimbursement actually covered it
Every reimbursement should match a specific discrepancy at the unit level. Unmatched discrepancies — and partial or undervalued reimbursements — are your remaining claims, and their clocks are running.
Escalation before expiry
A claim filed at day 55 with no follow-up can die in a case queue. The system needs to track case status and escalate while the window is still open.
You can run all of that in a spreadsheet if you're disciplined and small. Past a certain volume, it's exactly the kind of clock-watching software should do. ClawbackPro tracks every event's window automatically — unit-level detection across all 8 recovery categories, claims filed the day windows open, cases tracked and escalated before they expire. Pricing is 15% of what's actually recovered, charged only after Amazon pays; $0 otherwise.
FAQ: Amazon Reimbursement Time Limits
What is the Amazon reimbursement time limit in 2026?
For most claim types, 60 days. FC lost/damaged claims must be filed within 60 days of the item being reported lost or damaged; customer return claims run 60–120 days after the refund; removals lost in transit run 15–75 days from shipment creation; other removal claims close 60 days after delivery back to you; and inbound claims have roughly a 60-day window once the shipment becomes eligible for investigation.
Didn't Amazon give sellers 18 months to file claims?
It used to. Before October 23, 2024, the manual-claim window was 18 months. Amazon cut it by roughly 90% effective that date. Any audit routine built on the old window now guarantees expired claims.
When can I file for a refunded item the customer never returned?
Not before day 60 — customers have that long to physically return the item. The window then stays open until day 120 after the refund or replacement date. That 60-day filing window opens and closes on a clock most sellers aren't watching, which is why returns are FBA's biggest single leak.
Does Amazon's auto-reimbursement mean I can ignore the deadlines?
No. Amazon does proactively reimburse most warehouse lost/damaged and many customer-return cases, but automation misses units: mismatched quantities, partial payments, undervalued reimbursements, and events that never trigger. Everything it misses is now on a short manual-claim clock — so the deadlines matter more, not less.
What happens if I miss an FBA claim window?
The claim is generally unrecoverable. Amazon treats late filings as out of policy, and there's no standard appeal path for an expired window. The only reliable fix is preventive: audit monthly so every discrepancy is found while it's still claimable.
The 60-day era rewards exactly one habit: checking every clock, every month. Whether you do that with a calendar reminder and the Inventory Ledger or with software watching every event automatically, do it before the next window closes — because one closes almost every day.