Every Amazon Associates commission rate, and the 2026 changes that quietly cut what you earn.
The full US category table, copied from Amazon’s own schedule and dated. Then the part most rate pages have not updated: two attribution changes in 2026 that reduced real payouts without touching a single published percentage.
The short version
- Most physical categories pay 1%–4.5%. The 10% headline rates apply to Luxury Beauty and Amazon Explore, which almost nobody writes about.
- Anything uncategorised pays 4% under “All Other Categories” — often more than the named category a product sits in.
- Two 2026 changes matter more than the rates. Since 14 April 2026, onsite commission is calculated on the promoted ASIN and its variants rather than on whatever else the shopper buys — so the “halo” earnings that quietly padded most affiliate income are largely gone.
- Rate × price × conversion is the only number that matters. A 3% category at $400 beats a 10% category at $30, every time.
- Your account may not use the public table at all. Check your own rate card before planning around anything here.
Amazon publishes a commission table, changes it without announcement, and leaves a hundred blog posts quoting the version from three years ago. This page is the current one, copied from Amazon’s own schedule, with the date it was checked printed next to it — so you can tell at a glance whether it has gone stale.
It also covers the thing most rate pages miss entirely. In 2026 Amazon changed how commission is attributed twice. Neither change altered a published percentage, and both reduced what publishers actually got paid. If your earnings fell this year while your traffic held steady, the explanation is further down this page rather than in the table.
Scope. Every figure here is for Amazon.com (US), checked August 2026 against the Associates Program Fee Schedule. Other locales run their own tables — amazon.co.uk, .de and .in all differ, sometimes sharply. If you sell to several countries, see localising affiliate links by country.
The full commission rate table
Amazon calls these fixed standard program fee rates. The rate is applied to the item price — not to shipping, gift wrap, or tax.
| Rate | Categories |
|---|---|
| 10.00% | Luxury Beauty, Luxury Stores Beauty, Amazon Explore |
| 5.00% | Digital Music, Physical Music, Handmade, Digital Videos |
| 4.50% | Physical Books, Kitchen, Automotive |
| 4.00% | Amazon Fire Tablet Devices, Amazon Kindle Devices, Amazon Fire TV Devices, Fire TV Edition Smart TVs, Amazon Echo Devices, Ring Devices, Amazon Cloud Cam Devices, Luxury Stores Fashion, Apparel, Watches, Jewelry, Luggage, Shoes, Handbags & Accessories |
| 3.00% | Toys, Furniture, Home, Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Pets Products, Headphones, Beauty, Musical Instruments, Business & Industrial Supplies, Outdoors, Tools, Sports, Baby Products, Amazon Coins |
| 2.50% | PC, PC Components, DVD & Blu-Ray |
| 2.00% | Televisions, Digital Video Games |
| 1.00% | Amazon Fresh, Grocery, Health & Personal Care, Physical Video Games & Video Game Consoles |
| 0.00% | Gift Cards, Wireless Service Plans, Alcoholic Beverages, Digital Kindle Products bought by a subscriber, Vehicles, Pet Prescription Medications, Restaurant Food Delivery, Amazon Appstore, Prime Now, Amazon Pay Places |
| 4.00% | All Other Categories — the fallback for anything not named above |
Source: Amazon Associates Program Fee Schedule, US, checked 25 August 2026. Amazon changes this without notice — if you are reading this months later, re-check before planning around it.
On the “Amazon Games — 20%” figure you will see elsewhere. A large number of published rate lists still show a 20% Amazon Games rate. It does not appear in the US fixed-rate schedule as checked above. It may be locale-specific, promotional, or simply carried forward from an older table that nobody re-verified. Treat any 20% claim as unconfirmed until you see it on your own rate card — and note that this is exactly how a rate page goes stale without its author noticing.
The same table, sorted by what you will actually write about
The headline rates are misleading because almost nobody runs a Luxury Beauty site. Here is the table again, restricted to the categories affiliate publishers actually cover.
What changed in 2026 — and why your earnings fell without the rates moving
This is the section that matters more than the table, and the one most rate pages have not touched.
Amazon made two structural changes in 2026. Neither one edited a published percentage, which is precisely why they went largely unnoticed — a publisher checking the rate table would see nothing wrong. Both reduced real payouts.
1. Halo commission was cut back to the promoted product
For most of the program’s history, Amazon paid you on whatever the shopper bought within the session, not only the thing you linked. Link a kettle, the reader buys a toaster instead, you earn on the toaster. That “halo” income was invisible in your reports but it was a meaningful share of most affiliate earnings — for review sites built around a single product, often a large one.
From 14 April 2026, onsite commission is calculated on the promoted ASIN and its variants. The unrelated-purchase income is substantially gone.
2. The qualifying window moved to 180 days from receipt
Amazon also tightened when a sale counts. The customer must pay for and receive the item — or stream or download it — within 180 days of the click. In practice this changes little for a book that ships tomorrow. It matters for pre-orders, made-to-order furniture, and anything with a long lead time, where a sale you thought you had made can fall outside the window.
How confident should you be in this section? The rate table above is copied from Amazon’s own published schedule and you can check it yourself in one click. The two changes here were reported through April and May 2026 by trade press including Adweek and eMarketer, and by publishers describing the effect on their own accounts. Amazon does not issue a changelog. Treat the direction as well established and the exact mechanics as reported rather than documented — and confirm against the Operating Agreement before making a business decision on it.
The rate is the least important number in your earnings
This is where most people planning a niche site go wrong. They sort the table descending and pick the top row. Commission rate is one of three multipliers, and it is the one with the smallest range.
Earnings = traffic × conversion rate × average order value × commission rate
Rate varies by about 4× across realistic categories. Order value varies by 100× or more. That is the whole argument.
| Scenario | Category rate | Item price | Per sale | Per 100 sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Protein powder | 1.0% (Health) | $35 | $0.35 | $35 |
| Kitchen mixer | 4.5% (Kitchen) | $380 | $17.10 | $1,710 |
| Gaming TV | 2.0% (Televisions) | $900 | $18.00 | $1,800 |
| Luxury serum | 10.0% (Luxury Beauty) | $48 | $4.80 | $480 |
| Cordless drill | 3.0% (Tools) | $210 | $6.30 | $630 |
| Office chair | 3.0% (Home) | $450 | $13.50 | $1,350 |
Read the second and third rows against the fourth. Televisions pay the second-worst rate in the entire table at 2%, and a single television sale earns nearly four times what a Luxury Beauty sale earns at five times the rate. The 10% category loses, badly, because the basket is small.
The rule that follows. Chase price × intent, not rate. A 3% category where people buy $200–500 items after doing research is the best combination on Amazon, which is why tools, kitchen, home, outdoors and furniture carry so much of the affiliate industry. Grocery and health look attractive because people buy constantly, and pay 1% on a $30 basket.
The category trap nobody warns you about
A product’s listing category and its commission category are not always the same, and you cannot tell which rate applied until the sale appears in your report. A stand mixer might pay the Kitchen rate; a similar mixer sold as a small appliance might land in “All Other Categories” at 4%. This is not something you can look up in advance.
The practical response is to check earned rates in your Associates reports after the fact rather than assuming from the table, and to notice when a product you promote heavily is paying less than you modelled.
Bounties — the flat fees that beat the percentages
Alongside percentage commission, Amazon pays fixed amounts when someone signs up for a service. These are worth understanding because a single bounty can be worth more than fifty product sales in a low-rate category.
A Prime or Audible sign-up bounty in the region of a few dollars to roughly $25 outperforms 1% on a $30 grocery basket by two orders of magnitude. If your audience is the right fit — a books site recommending Audible, a parenting site mentioning Prime delivery — bounties deserve more attention than they usually get.
Why there is no bounty table on this page. Bounty amounts change frequently, run as time-limited events, and differ by locale far more than product rates do. Any table printed here would be wrong within weeks. Check the current list on the fee schedule — it is the same page as the rate table, further down. Publishing a stale bounty table is one of the main reasons competing rate pages mislead people.
Check your own rate card before you trust any table
The published schedule is the default. It is not necessarily what your account earns. Amazon issues custom rate cards, runs promotional rates, and applies locale-specific tables — and none of that shows up in a public document.
- Your rate card: Associates Central → Account Settings → Payment and tax, where a custom rate card appears if one applies to you.
- What you actually earned: Reports → Earnings, then group by category. This is the honest number, because it reflects attribution as well as rate.
- Per-link performance: use tracking IDs per site or per content type so you can see which pages earn rather than which pages get clicks.
If your reported rate is consistently below the table for a category you promote heavily, the likely explanations are category mismatch, returned orders netted off, or attribution loss from the April 2026 change. Reports will tell you which; the table never will.
What to actually do about the 2026 changes
Four responses, in the order they pay off.
1. Match the link to the intent
Halo income is gone, so a reader who lands on the wrong product page earns you nothing. Every link should send a decided reader to the exact product the sentence around it is about.
2. Move up the price ladder
Rate is capped; basket size is not. One article about $400 products is worth ten about $30 ones, at the same traffic and a lower rate.
3. Fix the products that stopped selling
A discontinued or out-of-stock product earns 0% at any rate. On an older site this is usually a bigger leak than the rate change — and it is invisible until you look.
4. Stop relying on one program
Two attribution cuts in one year is a signal. Amazon is excellent for conversion and poor for rate; treat it as one income line rather than the whole business.
Point three is the one people skip, and on a site more than a year old it is usually worth more than everything else on this list combined. Products get discontinued, go permanently out of stock, or lose their Buy Box, and the link keeps returning a healthy 200 response so no broken-link checker ever flags it. The page looks fine. It simply stops earning.
We wrote a full method for auditing that — manual, free-tool and API approaches — in how to find dead Amazon affiliate links. If you have not checked in a year, start there rather than here: recovering products that pay 3% beats optimising for products that pay 4%.
Part of The Amazon Affiliate Site Playbook — the whole job in six stages, from choosing a niche to keeping a mature site earning.
Know which products stopped paying you
Ama Affiliate Pro scans every published post for Amazon products that have been discontinued or gone out of stock, and tells you which pages are affected — before the commission quietly disappears from your report.
Start a 14-day trialCommon questions
What is the average Amazon affiliate commission rate?
For a typical affiliate site covering physical products, effective earnings usually land between 2% and 4% once category mix, returns and attribution are accounted for. Model your site at 3%. The 10% figure applies to Luxury Beauty and Amazon Explore, which are not categories most publishers can build a site around.
How long does the Amazon affiliate cookie last?
The standard tracking window is 24 hours from the click. If the reader adds an item to their cart within that window, the window extends to 90 days for that cart item. Separately, since 2026 the customer must also receive the product within 180 days of the click for the sale to qualify.
Why is my earned rate lower than the published table?
Four usual causes. The product sits in a different commission category than you assumed; returns and cancellations are netted off; some of the sale was shipping or tax, which do not earn; or the purchase was an unrelated product that would have earned halo commission before April 2026 and now earns nothing. Group your earnings report by category to see which.
Do commission rates differ by country?
Yes, significantly. Each Amazon locale publishes its own schedule, and the same category can pay noticeably different rates on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazon.de. If a meaningful share of your traffic is international, the bigger issue is usually that those readers land on a store they cannot buy from at all — see localising Amazon affiliate links by country.
Does Amazon still pay commission on products the reader buys instead of the one I linked?
Largely no, not since 14 April 2026. Onsite commission is now calculated on the promoted ASIN and its variants rather than on the whole basket. This is the single biggest earnings change of the year for most publishers, and it rewards precise, intent-matched linking over broad gift-guide traffic.
Which Amazon category is best for a new affiliate site?
Judge on price × research intent, not rate. Tools, kitchen, home, outdoors, furniture and pet equipment combine a 3–4.5% rate with $100–500 baskets and buyers who read before purchasing. Avoid grocery and health, which pay 1%, and treat electronics with care — televisions pay 2%, and PC components 2.5%.
Are commission rates negotiable?
Not through the standard program. Amazon does issue custom rate cards to some publishers, generally at significant volume and usually initiated by Amazon. If you have one it appears under Account Settings → Payment and tax, and it overrides the public table.
How often does Amazon change the rates?
There is no schedule, no changelog and no advance notice. Major restructures happened in 2017, 2020 and again through 2026. The practical defence is to check your earnings report by category every month — a rate change shows up there before it shows up in any blog post, including this one.
Keeping this page honest. The table above was verified against Amazon’s published schedule on 25 August 2026. If you find it out of date, tell us and we will correct it — a rate page that nobody re-checks is worse than no rate page, and most of the ones ranking for this term have not been touched in years.