Q4 on Amazon: the six dates that decide your peak and what missing one costs

Most Amazon sellers can name Black Friday. Fewer can name the date their stock has to land at an Amazon fulfilment centre to be on sale that day, and fewer still know the date after which Amazon stops accepting their Black Friday deal. Q4 on Amazon is decided by six dates, and only two of them are the ones shoppers know about. The other four are Amazon’s, and Amazon does not move them for anyone.

This post walks through all six for the UK marketplace in 2026, what each one triggers, and what it costs when you miss it. Every date and fee below comes from Amazon’s own peak season announcements on Seller Central, published in July 2026, with the two consumer dates confirmed against the calendar. Where Amazon has published a UK figure it is quoted in sterling. Where the only figure available is from the US announcement, that is stated.

The six dates in one place

Source for the fee window, the inventory cutoff and the deal deadline: Amazon’s “Peak season 2026: Inventory dates, peak fees, deal cutoffs and promotions” announcement for the UK and European marketplaces, posted by the Amazon news team on Seller Central in July 2026. Black Friday is the fourth Friday of November, which in 2026 falls on the 27th, and Cyber Monday is the Monday after.

15 October and 14 January: the fee window

Amazon’s festive peak fulfilment fee runs from 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027. For the UK marketplace the charge is £0.12 per parcel item and £0.07 per large or extra-large envelope item, on top of the standard FBA fulfilment fee, plus a 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge. That is per unit shipped to a customer, not per order and not per inbound shipment, so a 500-unit week in November carries £60 of peak fee before the surcharge.

Compare that with last year. Amazon’s UK announcement for the 2025 peak, also published on Seller Central, set the charge at £0.10 per parcel item and £0.05 per envelope item over the same 15 October to 14 January window. So the parcel fee is up £0.02 per unit for 2026, a 20% increase on the peak surcharge itself, and the envelope fee is up £0.02, a 40% increase. Neither figure will break a business on its own. Both are the kind of cost that quietly erodes a margin that was already calculated in the summer on last year’s numbers.

The practical effect of the fee window is on pricing and on sell-through. Any Q4 price you set in September should already include the £0.12. And the end date matters as much as the start. Stock that is still sitting in FBA after 14 January has been paying the peak rate on every unit sold through the quietest fortnight of the year, when the surcharge was designed to cover November and December volume. If your Q4 forecast leaves you with a month of cover on 14 January, you ordered too much, and the peak fee is the least of the cost. The 2025 fee, per Amazon’s own note, could be previewed in the Revenue Calculator and the FBA fee preview report from 1 October, so check the same tools this year for the exact figure on each of your ASINs.

28 October: the date that actually decides your Black Friday

Of the six, this is the one to write on the wall. Amazon’s UK inventory cutoff for Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday is 28 October 2026. That is the date by which FBA inbound stock needs to have arrived at Amazon’s fulfilment centres to be Prime-eligible for the event. Stock that lands on 29 October still sells, but Amazon makes no promise that it will be checked in, received and available with the Prime badge by 27 November. In peak, the check-in queue is the longest of the year, and the gap between “arrived at the dock” and “available to buy” can stretch to weeks.

Two things trip sellers up here. The first is treating 28 October as a dispatch date. It is an arrival date. Work backwards from it: allow your carrier’s transit time, then the appointment lead time at the fulfilment centre, then your own pick and pack. For most UK sellers sending by pallet that turns 28 October into a mid-October collection, and for anyone with stock still at a factory overseas it is already close to too late for sea freight.

The second is assuming one date covers every shipment route. Amazon’s US announcement for the same event staggers the deadlines by inbound method: 14 October for Amazon Warehousing and Distribution, 21 October for FBA shipments with minimal splits, and 28 October for FBA shipments with Amazon-optimised splits. The UK announcement gives the single 28 October date. If you use AWD or have chosen minimal shipment splits, check your own Seller Central account for the date that applies to your route before you assume you have until the 28th.

The cost of missing it is the event itself. Adobe Analytics put UK online spend across the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday 2025 at £3.8 billion, up 4.6% on the year before. A listing without the Prime badge in that window competes for that spend at a disadvantage against every rival that shipped on time, and there is no bid adjustment or price cut in November that buys the badge back once the stock has missed the cutoff.

18 November: the deal deadline, and the discount you have already missed

Deals are the other half of Black Friday. A Lightning Deal or a Best Deal puts the product on the Deals page and the event landing pages, which is where a large share of Black Friday browsing starts. For the UK and European marketplaces, Amazon’s deadline to submit a deal for Black Friday Week is 18 November 2026. Submit on the 19th and there is no deal to run.

Deals are not free. Amazon’s 2026 UK promotion fee is £12 upfront per promotion plus 0.75% of promotional sales, capped at £600. Amazon also offered a 30% discount on that upfront fee for deals submitted by 5 September for Black Friday Week. That date has passed. If you have not submitted yet, the fee is the full £12. The £3.60 saving matters less than what the date reveals: Amazon opened the Black Friday deal window on 8 July, and sellers who plan Q4 in October are already the last in the queue for the slots.

One change for 2026 that matters for anyone relying on Prime Exclusive Discounts instead of deals: Amazon now requires a minimum product rating of 3.5 stars for a Prime Exclusive Discount to be eligible. A product that launched over the summer with a handful of mixed reviews may not qualify, and there is no appeal on a rating. If a Q4 product is sitting at 3.4 stars today, the work to fix that is review-side and it needs to start now, not in November.

What to do with the six dates this week

Start with 28 October and work backwards. Pull your Q4 forecast, product by product, and for each one write down the date the stock has to leave your warehouse or your supplier to be at an Amazon fulfilment centre by the 28th. Any product where that date is before today has a decision attached to it: air freight it, accept it will not be Prime-eligible for the event, or drop it from the Black Friday plan and put the ad budget behind something that will be in stock.

Then take the fee window. Reprice anything that has not been repriced since the 2026 UK peak fee was announced, using £0.12 per parcel item and the 1.5% surcharge, and check the Revenue Calculator for the exact figure on each ASIN. Look at your forecast against 14 January and ask honestly whether the stock will be gone by then. If not, either trim the order or plan a January promotion now so the stock does not sit paying a surcharge through the quietest month of the year.

Submit your Black Friday Week deals before 18 November, and preferably this month, because the early slots go first. Check every Q4 product’s star rating against the 3.5 threshold if you plan to use a Prime Exclusive Discount instead. And put 27 and 30 November in the diary with the ad budget headroom to match, because a campaign that runs out of daily budget at lunchtime on Black Friday has done half a day’s work on the biggest day of the year.

None of the four Amazon dates is a surprise. Amazon published all of them in July. The sellers who have a calm November are the ones who read the announcement in the summer and built the plan around it. Everyone else finds out about 28 October on 29 October.