Amazon payouts explained: DD+7, the reserve and your settlement report

A strong week of sales, then a deposit that looks like a fraction of it, usually doesn't mean anything has gone wrong. Between a sale and your bank sit Amazon's fees, a hold on each order until a week after delivery, and a settlement with a reserve taken out. Here's how each works, how to read the two reports that track them, and how to plan a wholesale business's cash around the gap.

Why your payout is lower than your sales

Amazon's page on how seller payments work describes every settlement the same way: start from your beginning balance, add sales, subtract expenses, adjust for refunds, hold an amount back in reserve, and transfer the rest. So your sales figure is what customers bought, and your deposit is what was released to you in that period after everything Amazon takes out.

Sales tax that Amazon collects and sends to the states for you isn't part of your payout either. Our seller taxes guide covers what Amazon handles there.

Fees and refunds are real costs, and our fees guide explains each one. The hold and the reserve are timing, and the rest of this page is about them, because in wholesale you pay suppliers before Amazon pays you.

What DD+7 means

DD+7 is short for delivery date plus seven days. It's Amazon's standard payout policy for orders that get delivered.

Three things follow from it.

• The clock starts at delivery. Not when the customer orders, and not when the unit ships. Two orders placed on the same day can release on different days if one of them arrives later.
• Released isn't paid. When the hold ends, the money moves into your available balance. It reaches your bank with the next disbursement, and Amazon says a transfer can take up to five business days to appear in your account.
• Seven is the usual number, not a promise. Amazon's public payments page says that with deliveries it typically holds funds for seven days, and an Amazon staff post on the US Seller Forums put the hold at usually 7 to 14 days. Amazon lists each held amount with its expected release date (more on that report below), so read your own account rather than assume.

One order, traced from the click to your bank

Here's a single order with days instead of dollars. It's an illustration: it assumes a two-day delivery, and your dates will differ.

In this example the money reaches your bank somewhere between about a week and a half and about a month after the customer ordered. Most of that spread comes from where the release lands in the two-week settlement cycle, which you don't control.

If your account has it, a requested payout only moves your available balance, which is money that has already cleared its hold. It shortens the wait for the settlement, not the seven days. Amazon also offers Express Payout to eligible sellers in its US store, and its payments page says enrolled sellers receive payouts within 24 hours. That page doesn't mention a cost, so read the terms in Seller Central before you enroll.

What the reserve is

Sellers use "reserve" for two different holds, and Seller Central shows them in different places.

Deferred transactions are the per-order holds. Each order's money waits for its own release date, set by its delivery under DD+7 (or, for a few orders, by something else, covered in the next section). Once released, it's paid in a later settlement.

The account level reserve is a portion of your balance that Amazon holds back for a period of time to cover possible refunds and chargebacks. At each settlement, Amazon withholds the reserve before it pays you, and the reserved amount becomes the beginning balance of your next settlement period. So it isn't a charge: it rolls forward and is released as later periods settle. Amazon's payments page calls it "a normal part of selling in the Amazon store," and an Amazon staff member on the US Seller Forums pointed a seller to where it shows: the account level reserve line in Statement View, in the Payments report.

Why a payout can shrink or stop

Amazon's payments page lists the usual causes of a delayed payout:

• Your bank account details are missing or invalid. Amazon says it won't start a payment until they're fixed.
• The credit or debit card on your account doesn't match, has expired or has another problem.
• Your balance is zero or negative after fees, refunds and the reserve, so there's nothing to send.
• Your account has performance problems or suspicious activity. Amazon points sellers to their performance notifications in Seller Central.

Most of the fix is housekeeping. Keep the bank account and card current, and watch your Account Health page and your notifications, because account problems can hold money. If the reserve looks wrong or doesn't come down over several settlements, open a case with Seller Support and keep the case ID: when sellers raised reserve questions on the forums, Amazon staff asked for one so they could look into it.

A deactivated account is different. Amazon can hold payouts after a deactivation, and there's a separate appeal route for the money. Our guide to Section 3 deactivations explains both.

Reading the deferred transactions report

Deferred transactions are money you've earned that Amazon hasn't released yet. To see them, go to Payments in Seller Central, open Transaction View, and filter the transaction status to deferred. An Amazon staff post on the US Seller Forums explains that this view gives each one's deferral reason and expected release date, and that a transaction leaves the deferred list once it's released and moves into your regular payment reports.

You'll usually see one of two reasons.

If you sell to business customers through Amazon Business, the second row matters: an invoiced order can sit on this list for weeks, not days.

You may still see advice to download a separate deferred transactions report. Amazon announced on its US Seller Forums that by April 30, 2026 its Date Range Transaction and Summary reports would list deferred transactions beside released ones, with a column saying which is which and a release date that stays blank while the money is still held, so the separate report is no longer needed. We haven't seen the new columns in a signed-in account. If your date range report has them, it gives you the same list in a spreadsheet.

Use it as your short-term cash forecast

This list tells you what becomes available and when, which is what you need before you commit to a supplier invoice:

1. Add up the amounts with a release date in the next seven days. That's the money about to join your available balance, less any refunds that come in meanwhile.
2. Put it beside the supplier invoices you owe over the same week and the next.
3. Look for anything still listed after its release date. If it doesn't clear within a day or two, ask Seller Support about it.
4. Watch the total over a few weeks. As sales grow, the deferred total grows with them. That's normal, and it's why a growing account can feel short of cash while it's profitable. Our guide to what changes as a wholesale business grows covers the point where cash becomes the limit.

Reading your settlement report

A settlement report is the full explanation of one payout. According to an Amazon staff post on the US Seller Forums, a report for each settlement period is posted on the All Statements page of the Payments report when your account settles, with three downloads: an XML file, a tab-delimited flat file, and Flat File V2, which FBA sellers can use with Amazon's Settlement Summary Template to build a pivot table by order. Amazon's developer documentation now marks the XML and older flat file reports as deprecated and says Flat File V2 replaces them, so V2 is the one to learn. You can't request a settlement report yourself: the same documentation says Amazon schedules them automatically.

The columns that matter

Amazon's developer documentation for the V2 file lists its columns. These are the ones you'll use most:

How to read it, in order

1. Match the total to your bank

   Find the deposit-date and total-amount in your bank account and on the Disbursements tab in Payments. If they match, everything else in the file explains that one deposit.

2. Group the lines

   Make a pivot table of amount by transaction-type and amount-description. You get the period's sales, each kind of fee, refunds and other charges as totals.

3. Find the reserve lines

   One line pays back the reserve held last period, and another holds back this period's. The difference between them explains why the deposit is higher or lower than sales minus fees and refunds.

4. Check your best sellers

   Filter to your top SKUs and compare their fees per unit with what you planned when you bought them. A higher fee changes what you can pay the supplier next time.

5. Mind the dates

   The report holds what was released and posted in its period, so a sale late in one month can show up in next month's settlement.

Cash is not profit

A settlement report is cash: what Amazon paid you, and when. It knows nothing about what you paid your supplier. A profit and loss statement is the other view. It counts a sale when it happens and subtracts the cost of goods sold, what those particular units cost you. You need both. A month can be profitable and still leave you short of cash, because the money is in stock, in the hold or in the reserve. Our bookkeeping guide shows how to turn settlements into a monthly profit and loss.

The cash timeline from purchase order to payout

For a wholesale seller, the payout is the last step of a longer loop that starts when you pay a supplier.

Your supplier, your prep center and Amazon's receiving set steps 1 to 4. How fast the product sells, plus the payout timing above, sets steps 5 to 7. Every unit runs its own clock, so an order comes back in pieces, and its slowest product decides when the last of the money is home. Our guide to placing a first wholesale order walks the same stages from the buying side.

Payment terms move step 1. On net 30, you pay the supplier's invoice 30 days after it's issued instead of upfront, which can put the payment after your first payouts from that order arrive. New accounts usually prepay. Terms tend to come once you've ordered a few times, and our guides on payment terms for a new account and negotiating with distributors cover how to ask.

The loop is easier to see when it runs through one account. Stef's setup in The Checklist lesson is to send Amazon's payouts to the business bank account and pay suppliers from that same account:

"After you have obtained your business bank account, you then can set it up for your Amazon account payouts, so now everything is going to one account, and you could then use that same account to pay your suppliers."

From Stef's lesson (The Checklist, at 2:47)

Planning cash around it

You can't shorten DD+7, but you can stop it from surprising you. Start by putting days on the loop for each supplier you buy from.

• Days until it's on sale: the supplier's lead time, plus transit, plus your prep center's days, plus Amazon's receiving.
• Days to sell through: the units you ordered divided by the units you sell a day.
• Days from sale to bank: delivery time, plus about seven days of hold, plus up to two weeks waiting for the settlement, plus up to five business days for the transfer.

Add the three, and you know roughly how long a dollar you spend with that supplier is away from you. It's longer than most people guess, and it's the number to plan with.

Reorder before the money is back. A product that sells well needs reordering while its current stock is still selling, so you pay the supplier again before the last order has paid you back. Our guide on when to reorder works out the reorder point from lead time and daily sales. Keep enough cash aside to pay for the reorders you expect to place while the money from current stock is still on its way, counted at their full landed cost: the goods, freight, prep and inbound fees. Our startup cost guide shows how to budget that reserve from the first order.

Order cover to fit your cash. Stef sets how many days of stock a reorder should buy, and he ties the choice to cash:

"No matter how much cash you have sitting in the bank, I would always recommend doing thirty days default. Of course, if you wanna be placing an order and you're a little bit more cash reserved, setting it up to fifteen days is going to help you understand how many units you should be buying to have fifteen days worth of stock."

From Stef's lesson (Restocking, at 9:43)

A shorter cover ties up less cash in each order, but you reorder more often, so supplier payments come around more often against payouts that still arrive on Amazon's schedule. Pick the cover your cash can carry, then check it against the routine below.

Some sellers bridge the gap with credit, or with services that advance Amazon payouts for a fee. Compare that cost with ordering a little less until payouts catch up with your buying.