Amazon Q4 2026 Calendar: Every Deal and Inventory Deadline for Sellers

Every year the same thing happens on the Amazon Seller Forums in September. Somebody asks when the Black Friday inventory has to be in, somebody else answers with last year's date, and a third person points out that the deal submission window closed a week ago. The dates are all published. They are just published in four places.

This is the calendar in one place, in date order, taken from Amazon's own announcements for holiday 2026 as read on 16 September 2026. Where a date has already passed it is still listed, because the plan for the next event is built from the shape of the last one.

Amazon's holiday runs as three overlapping windows. The deal windows decide what is on sale and when it was submitted. The inbound windows decide whether stock is in a fulfilment centre in time to sell. The peak fulfilment period decides what each unit costs to ship. A plan that gets one of them right and the other two wrong is the plan most sellers run.

Amazon's own summary of the year is the title of its announcement: same fees, same eligibility, earlier deadlines. The fees and rules are unchanged from Prime Day 2026. The dates moved forward, and the movement is the whole story.

The deal submission window opened on 8 July and was due to close on 8 September; Amazon extended it to 22 September. The early submission discount deadline of 5 August saved $50 on the upfront fee. The event itself ran on 6 and 7 October, early in the month as it was in 2025. If a deal was not submitted by 22 September it is not in the event; a price discount on the listing still runs, but it is not a Prime Big Deal Days deal and does not carry the badge.

The inbound deadlines for the event were 2 September for AWD, 9 September for FBA shipments with minimal shipment splits, and 16 September for FBA shipments with Amazon-optimised splits. Amazon's wording is worth keeping: inventory arriving after these cutoff dates is not guaranteed to be processed in time. Arrived is not the same as available.

The deal submission window ran from 8 July to 20 October, with the early submission discount deadline on 5 September. It closed the day before the first inbound cutoff, which is the order Amazon wants: decide the deal, then ship the stock for it. A thread pinned in the Seller Forums after that close named 13 November as the deadline for Best Deals and Lightning Deals, a date Amazon's own announcements do not give; the Deals dashboard shows whether a product can still be submitted.

The inbound deadlines were 14 October for AWD, 21 October for FBA with minimal shipment splits, and 28 October for FBA with Amazon-optimised splits. Amazon adds two scheduling rules that decide whether a shipment actually makes its date: a standard delivery has to be scheduled at least 7 days before the cutoff, and a pickup with an Amazon partnered carrier at least 14 days before. A shipment booked on the cutoff day has missed it.

One more line from the announcement explains why October is tight: fulfilment centres focus on receiving in September and October, then shift to order processing in November and December. Stock that arrives in November is received when receiving is no longer the priority.

Prime Big Deal Days ran on 6 and 7 October 2026. Amazon announced those dates to shoppers in mid-September, after the AWD cutoff of 2 September and the first FBA cutoff of 9 September had passed. A seller who waited to hear the event dates before shipping had already missed two of the three inbound deadlines for it.

Black Friday Week followed the same order. Amazon's shopper page, updated on 10 November, set Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday from 12:01 a.m. PST on 19 November through 30 November, twelve days in all. The last FBA cutoff for it was 28 October, so every unit selling in it was on its way to a fulfilment centre before shoppers knew when the event started.

Set beside 2025, the shape holds. Prime Big Deal Days ran on 7 and 8 October 2025, also a Tuesday and Wednesday early in October. Black Friday Week ran from 20 November to 1 December 2025, starting on the Thursday eight days before Black Friday and ending on Cyber Monday, as the 2026 event does.

The lesson for the plan is the order of things. The seller calendar comes first and the shopper calendar is published after the stock has had to move, so next year's plan is built on the deadlines and the pattern, never on waiting for the announcement.

The holiday peak fulfilment fee applies from 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027. Amazon puts it at an average of $0.32 per unit over non-peak rates, the same increase as in 2025, and the separate 3.5% fuel and logistics related surcharge it has added to fulfilment fees since 17 April 2026 applies on top of it. It is not a deal fee and it does not depend on whether a product is in an event; every FBA unit shipped in the window carries it. The margin line for the quarter is drawn with it in, which the article on Amazon seller fees walks through fee by fee.

A deal in either event carries an upfront promotion fee of $100 per promotion and a variable fee of 1.5% of promotional sales, capped at $5,000. Those are the Prime Day 2026 figures, unchanged. There are no new eligibility requirements.

The rule sellers ask about most is the lookback. A Prime Big Deal Days promotional price is excluded from the 30 day and 60 day lookback windows, so the deal price does not become the reference price for the next one. That is what makes a deal in October and another in November possible without the second being priced against the first. The mechanics of reference prices and what a deal does to margin are in the repricing strategy article.

With the inbound and deal deadlines behind it, the rest of the season is selling, returns and fees, and each of them has a date.

Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday, from 19 to 30 November on Amazon's shopper page. The deals in it were submitted by 20 October; a product that missed that window could still sell at a lower price, but not as an event deal and without the badge.

Holiday returns. In October Amazon told sellers that items bought on Amazon.com from 1 November to 31 December 2026 can be returned until 31 January 2027, for seller-fulfilled orders as well as FBA ones, with an earlier date for Apple products, and that the policy will apply every year. A December sale is not settled until February, and the holiday returns window on self-ship orders sets out what that asks of a seller answering its own buyers.

Fees into January. The peak fulfilment fee covers units shipped up to 14 January 2027, so the first fortnight of January pays it too. Monthly storage, charged at a higher rate from October to December, goes back to the lower rate in January, which makes unsold stock cheaper to hold without making it any less of a decision.

5 August: early submission discount deadline, Prime Big Deal Days. 2 September: AWD cutoff, Prime Big Deal Days. 5 September: early submission discount deadline, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 9 September: FBA cutoff with minimal splits, Prime Big Deal Days. 16 September: FBA cutoff with optimised splits, Prime Big Deal Days. 22 September: deal submissions close, Prime Big Deal Days (extended from 8 September). Early October: Prime Big Deal Days. 14 October: AWD cutoff, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 15 October: the holiday peak fulfilment fee begins. 20 October: deal submissions close, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 21 October: FBA cutoff with minimal splits. 28 October: FBA cutoff with optimised splits. 14 January 2027: the holiday peak fulfilment fee ends.

Two dates are not in the announcement and belong on the plan anyway. Seven days before each FBA cutoff is the last day to schedule a standard delivery. Fourteen days before is the last day to book a partnered carrier pickup. Written into the calendar, the Black Friday deadlines were 7 and 14 October for a shipment that had to make 21 October.

When this was written in November 2026, Amazon had published none of next year's holiday deadlines. The only 2027 dates on this calendar belong to the 2026 season: the peak fulfilment fee ending on 14 January and the returns window closing on 31 January. In 2026 the deadlines arrived in an announcement in early July, the day before deal submissions opened on 8 July. A seller who waits for that announcement has about eight weeks to turn it into the purchase order that the arithmetic below puts in the first week of September.

So write next year's draft now, from this year's dates, while the reasons behind them are fresh. Three records make it worth having.

Every inbound shipment. The day it was booked, the day it was delivered and the day its units became available to sell, set against the cutoff it was meant for. The gap between delivery and availability in October is the number next year's booking dates are built from.

Every deal. The day it was submitted against its window, and whether it ran. The Prime Big Deal Days window was extended this year, from 8 to 22 September; a deal that relied on the extension was lucky rather than on time.

The cost of the season. What the peak fee cost per unit, product by product, and the holiday returns by reason once the window has closed at the end of January.

Until Amazon publishes its 2027 announcement, plan to this year's dates or earlier, never later: Amazon summed up its last change as earlier deadlines.

Work backwards from 21 October. A supplier lead time of four weeks and a freight lead time of two weeks puts the purchase order in the first week of September for stock shipped by sea, which is why the September conversation is always about what was ordered in August. Air freight buys three weeks, at a price that has to fit inside the margin the surcharge has already narrowed.

The capacity limit is the constraint the calendar does not show. A seller with a cutoff on the 21st and a limit that will not take the stock has a different problem, and the Inventory Performance Index that sets the limit is the same score that decides storage fees, which the fees article covers. The advertising that has to run beside a deal is a week's plan of its own, and the weekly PPC routine is the shape of it. The stock itself is a year round discipline, covered in Amazon inventory management, and the quarter is where a weak version of it shows.

For the brands we run, this calendar is the October plan: deals decided in September, stock booked against the 7 and 14 day scheduling rules, and the surcharge priced in before the first promotion goes live. That is the work of our Amazon marketplace management service, and the quarter is where it earns its place.