How long does Amazon hold your money? Deferred transactions and the account level reserve

In September 2026 a seller asked Amazon’s Seller Forums “Where is the deferred transactions report?” and explained, “I can get to a screen that shows them, but I’d like a report so i can filter by estimated release date.” Amazon holds your money in two places. Each sale waits until the parcel is delivered plus seven days as standard, then moves into your Amazon balance, where it waits for your next payout and up to five business days to reach your bank. The account level reserve holds money against claims, chargebacks and account reviews, with no release date at all. Legacy Seller Central shows each held order’s estimated release date on screen, but no download Amazon documents gives you that date. The only documented source of a future release date is Amazon’s newer Finances API, and read every day it turns the deferred part into a cash forecast, with the reserve beside it as the part that has no date.

This describes Amazon’s rules and reports as of 25 September 2026, from Seller Central’s help pages for the US and the UK, Amazon’s announcements and its developer documentation. Where two of Amazon’s pages disagree, the post says so.

How long does Amazon hold your money?

In two ways, with two answers. Amazon holds a sale until the parcel is delivered plus seven days as standard, and the money then waits for your next payout and up to five business days in transit. By Amazon’s own example, an order delivered on 6 January is in your Amazon balance from 14 January. Amazon holds the account level reserve until whatever it covers is resolved, a claim or a chargeback among them, and gives it no date.

Amazon’s reason for the first hold is on its help page. “Sales proceeds are reserved until we know the buyer received the order in the promised condition, and to ensure that you have enough funds to fulfill any returns, claims, or chargebacks.” Amazon calls the held sales deferred transactions and the rule behind them the delivery date policy, “DD + 7” on its pages.

	Deferred transactions	Account level reserve
What Amazon holds	Each sale, net of the fees that belong to the order, and invoiced orders awaiting the buyer’s payment	Money to cover refunds, claims and chargebacks, held for common reasons such as open claims, recent chargebacks, performance below Amazon’s benchmarks, an account under review, or income tax withholding
How long	Seven days after delivery as standard, longer on some accounts. Invoiced orders until the buyer pays, typically 30 to 45 days after the order	Until the claim is resolved or the chargeback processed. No time given for the other reasons
Release date	One per order, on the legacy screen and in the API	None
Where you see it	The Deferred transactions figure in the Total balance on the Payments dashboard, and order by order in Transaction View or Manage Transactions	The Account level reserve section of Statement View, “Unavailable balance” on the UK Payments dashboard, and Manage Transactions

What is a deferred transaction, and when does Amazon release it?

A sale Amazon has recorded and you have earned, but whose money is not yet available to pay out. Amazon’s words are “A deferred transaction is one where you have earned the amount, but it is not yet available for payout.” Amazon releases it seven days after delivery as standard, in the US and the UK alike, into your Amazon balance rather than your bank.

What it is

Standard orders are typically deferred under the delivery date policy. Invoiced orders from Amazon Business customers are deferred until the buyer pays, which Amazon says “typically occurs within 30-45 days after the order date”.

What is held is the order net of its own fees. The referral fee and the FBA fulfilment fee “are deferred along with the order payment”, while advertising, shipping labels bought through Amazon and other charges are billed “at the time of purchase or service billing.” So those come off your balance on the day while the sales that paid for them are still held, and the balance can go below zero with money on the way. If it is still negative at your next settlement, “you will need to make a payment.”

When it is released

Seven days after delivery, as standard. “Funds are reserved until a shipment is delivered, plus a reserve period. The standard reserve period is 7 days after delivery date”. With valid tracking from an integrated carrier the delivery date is the carrier’s. Without valid tracking Amazon uses “the latest estimated delivery date (EDD)”, which it says is typically later. “Your reserve period may be extended following an assessment of your overall risk and historical performance”.

Amazon’s own pages count the days differently. The delivery date page says “if you sell something on January 1, and it is delivered on January 6, then under the DD + 7 policy, your funds will become available for disbursement starting on January 14.” That is eight days after delivery. Its page on finding an order’s payment has an order delivered on 4 January releasing on 11 January, seven days.

Released is not paid. On release, “the transaction status will update to ‘released’ and funds will be available for transfer to your bank account.”

	US	UK
Scheduled payout	Every 14 days, or more often at Amazon’s option. Under the seller agreement, each payout is the balance as of two business days before the payout date	14 days after the first business day on which the transactions were completed
On demand	Once every 24 hours, and always the whole balance	Once every 24 hours, amounts held in reserve excluded
Minimum	None found on Amazon’s US pages	£1
Time to reach the bank	Up to five business days after Amazon starts the payment, or within 24 hours with Express Payout, which is on by default for eligible US sellers	Up to five working days, and Express Payout is a US store programme

The policy was on Amazon’s page by October 2021, in the Wayback Machine’s copy, but some accounts only moved onto it in 2026. One US seller posted an email from Amazon giving 12 March 2026 as their date, and two UK sellers posted 6 and 12 March. Those are dates sellers posted, not an Amazon page. If it was recently applied to your account, Amazon’s page says, “it is normal for all of your funds to be held in reserve.”

What is the account level reserve, and how is it different?

Money Amazon holds against obligations the delivery date hold does not cover, “such as refunds, claims, or chargebacks not covered by Delivery date-based reserve policies.” It is not tied to one order’s delivery, so it has no release date, and it can hold part or all of a balance.

Amazon’s page lists five common reasons, the ones in the table above, and says several can apply at once. Both the US and the UK page say delivery date holds now show as deferred transactions, the UK page most plainly, “Account level reserves do not include delivery date based (DD+7) reserves, which are shown in deferred transactions”.

How long it lasts is the difference that matters, and Amazon gives an event, never a date. For a claim, “the claim amount will be reserved until the claim is resolved. Some claims can take up to 14 days or longer to resolve”. For a chargeback, “The reserve will be released after the chargebacks are processed.” For performance, review and tax it gives no time, and the US seller agreement lets Amazon withhold payments “for as long as we determine any related risks to Amazon or third parties persist”. Amazon’s page says to respond to claims and chargebacks, points performance to the Account Health dashboard and review to its Account health FAQ, and names nothing that releases the money.

Two settlement statement lines belong to this reserve. Amazon defines “Previous Reserve Amount Balance” as “Funds held over from the previous statement that are being added back into the current statement”, and its “Reserve” line as “Funds held over between statements, usually due to pending A-to-z Guarantee claims or chargebacks.” The name “Current Reserve Amount” is on no Amazon page we read. It is what sellers’ settlement files call the hold, and Link My Books, a vendor, reads it as “Amazon holding the funds”.

Sellers mix the two holds up for a reason. The delivery date holds used to show inside this reserve, “as a lump sum amount Account-Level Reserves on your Payments Dashboard”, and in October 2024 Amazon said that by 1 November they would show as deferred transactions instead, with older ones staying in the reserve until released. In the 2026 rollout, Amazon staff wrote on the forums in April that “Some sellers may see their transactions displayed at an account-level reserve, rather than as individual deferred transactions, while we complete rollout of transaction-level visibility to deferrals”, and on 30 April that this “has been completed”. Those are forum replies, not a help page. One page to skip, “Amazon Pay Reserve Policy” ranks for these searches and “applies to merchants using Amazon Pay”, shops taking Amazon Pay on their own websites, not selling on Amazon.

Where can I download deferred transactions with their release dates?

As of 25 September 2026, nowhere that Amazon documents. Amazon documents the estimated release date on screen, in the legacy Transaction View, and for the new Seller Central says “View actual release date with settlement ID”. Its downloads either have no release date in the column list Amazon publishes, or carry a release date column that stays blank until the money has moved. The only documented source of a future release date is Amazon’s Finances API, in section 5.

Where	What you get	The release date
Transaction View, legacy Seller Central, filtered to Deferred transactions and updated	Each deferred order and its deferral reason, on screen	“the expected payment release date for each transaction”, on screen
Transaction View’s Download button	“all order and payment details for the dates you specify”, deferred ones listed by posted date	Amazon has not published the file’s columns
Manage Transactions, new Seller Central	Each transaction with its status and amount, on screen	A column named “Actual release date”, “The date when the funds are released for settlement”, though the same page also says “estimated or actual release date”. Amazon’s pages do not say which it shows for an order still held
Deferred Transaction Report, requested in the Reports Repository, also fetched over the Reports API	A point in time list of the transactions currently deferred	Not in the only column list Amazon publishes, 32 columns on its API page. One seller reports the download showed one
Date Range Transaction report, enhanced in 2026	Every transaction in the range, with a Transaction status and a Transaction release date column	Blank until the transaction is released
Statements	Released and paid transactions only, by settlement period	None, deferred transactions are not in it
listTransactions, Finances API	Every transaction with its status, and for a deferred one its maturityDate	Yes, “The release date of the transaction.”

The Deferred Transaction Report is the one the seller was looking for. Amazon announced it in October 2024, and since June 2025 it can also be fetched over the Reports API once requested in Seller Central. The only column list Amazon publishes for it, on that API page, has 32 columns and no release date, status or deferral reason. A seller wrote in April 2026 that it “shows individual release dates for each order as it moves through the system”, a seller’s words, not Amazon’s. Amazon’s page now says “Because your Transaction report now includes deferred transactions for a time period, a separate Deferred Transactions report isn’t needed.” That is the enhanced Date Range Transaction report, rolled out to US sellers from February 2026, complete by the end of March by the help page and by 30 April by the announcement, and to UK sellers from 23 March to the end of May 2026. Its two new columns are “Transaction status, to indicate whether a transaction is deferred or released, and Transaction release date. If a transaction is deferred, the release date column will be blank until the transaction is released.” So it tells you when money moved, after it moved.

Other sellers hit the same wall. The April 2026 seller could no longer find the report at all, “a technical problem that is severely impacting my ability to forecast cash flow for my business.”

How do you turn the held money into a cash forecast?

Read every held order’s release date as data, every day, add the payout rule and the transfer time, and sum by the day the money lands in the bank. Show the account level reserve beside it as one line with no date. Amazon’s Finances API is the only documented source of a future release date.

The technical section

This is the part to hand to whoever builds your reporting. Skip to section 6 if that is not you.

The release date as data

listTransactions in the Finances API version 2024-06-19 returns each transaction with a transactionStatus of DEFERRED, RELEASED or DEFERRED_RELEASED, and a deferred one can carry a DeferredContext with deferralReason, for example DD7 or B2B, and maturityDate, “The release date of the transaction.” The older v0 financial events leave deferred money out until release, and Amazon removes them on 27 August 2027. The call returns nothing if postedAfter and postedBefore are over 180 days apart, and “might not include orders from the last 48 hours.”

What the connectors land

Fivetran added transaction and transaction_context tables to its Amazon Selling Partner connector in September 2026, with transaction_status and posted_date on the first and deferral_reason and maturity_date on the second, and a transaction_related_identifier table for the links between transactions. Airbyte’s documentation says listTransactions is something “this connector doesn’t use yet”, so Airbyte lands no deferred transaction and no release date.

The reserve as data

listBalances, added in July 2026, returns the account level reserve as a total, balanceType ACCOUNT_LEVEL_RESERVE, with asOfDate for a past day. There is no per order reserve and no date, and Fivetran does not land it, so the reserve line is a direct call. Amazon’s own example returns the reserve as a negative number, -2000, so check the sign before adding it to anything.

The traps

Amazon documents the statuses in capitals and its own model example writes “Released”, so compare them case-insensitively. The contextType of a deferred context is not documented, so key on maturity_date being present, in the join, or an order with a product context and a deferred context counts twice. Whether Fivetran updates a row in place on release is not documented, so re-read the deferred rows daily. Amazon links a release to its deferred row with the identifiers DEFERRED_TRANSACTION_ID and RELEASE_TRANSACTION_ID, and says the deferred row’s status becomes DEFERRED_RELEASED on release, so the query drops a released row that points back to a deferred row it already counts. It also starts the payout list with the last payout already paid, or every earlier balance day would land in the first forecast payout. The query below has been run against the example and not against a live Amazon account.

A worked example

Five standard orders on a US store, forecast on Friday 9 October 2026. Amazon’s rules, invented orders, illustrative figures. The example fills each release date as delivery plus eight days, the convention of Amazon’s own example. On a live account the query reads whatever date Amazon puts in maturity_date. Each order is held net of a 15% referral fee, Amazon’s example rate, and a fulfilment fee. Advertising cost $18.00 a day from 5 to 9 October. Amazon bills it “at the time of purchase or service billing”, and the example assumes a charge each day. The opening balance is zero, the last payout already paid went out on 1 October, the next fall on 15 and 29 October, each payout is under the seller agreement the balance as of two business days before, 13 and 27 October, and the bank has the money up to five business days later, by 22 October and 5 November.

Order	Delivered	Release date in the data	Sale	Held, net of its fees	Status on 9 October
1	28 Sep	6 Oct	$79.00	$61.40	Released
2	3 Oct	11 Oct	$149.00	$118.15	Deferred
3	4 Oct	12 Oct	$62.00	$46.90	Deferred
4	6 Oct	14 Oct	$258.00	$205.60	Deferred
5	9 Oct	17 Oct	$112.00	$88.25	Deferred

The query drops any released row Amazon links to a deferred row it already counts, puts each transaction on the day it enters the balance, its maturity_date if it has one and its posted_date if not, sums by day, then assigns each day to the payout whose cut-off it falls on or before. The payout list starts with the last payout already paid, so anything on or before that cut-off stays out. The table name transaction is a keyword in some databases, so the query quotes it.

with released_twice as (
  select r.transaction_id
  from transaction_related_identifier r
  join transaction_context c
    on c.transaction_id = r.related_identifier_value
   and c.maturity_date is not null
  where upper(r.related_identifier_name) = 'DEFERRED_TRANSACTION_ID'
  union
  select r.related_identifier_value
  from transaction_related_identifier r
  join transaction_context c
    on c.transaction_id = r.transaction_id
   and c.maturity_date is not null
  where upper(r.related_identifier_name) = 'RELEASE_TRANSACTION_ID'
),
movement as (
  select
    coalesce(date(c.maturity_date), date(t.posted_date)) as balance_day,
    t.total_amount_currency_amount as amount,
    lower(t.transaction_status) as status
  from "transaction" t
  left join transaction_context c
    on c.transaction_id = t.transaction_id
   and c.maturity_date is not null
  where t.transaction_id not in (select transaction_id from released_twice)
),
by_day as (
  select
    balance_day,
    round(sum(amount), 2) as movement,
    round(sum(case when status = 'deferred' then amount else 0 end), 2) as held_before_costs
  from movement
  group by balance_day
),
payout as (
  select fixed_on, paid_on, in_bank_by,
         lag(fixed_on) over (order by fixed_on) as prev_fixed_on
  from (
    select '2026-09-29' as fixed_on, '2026-10-01' as paid_on, '2026-10-08' as in_bank_by
    union all
    select '2026-10-13', '2026-10-15', '2026-10-22'
    union all
    select '2026-10-27', '2026-10-29', '2026-11-05'
  )
)
select
  p.paid_on,
  p.in_bank_by,
  round(sum(d.movement), 2) as amount,
  round(sum(d.held_before_costs), 2) as held_before_costs
from by_day d
join payout p
  on d.balance_day > p.prev_fixed_on
 and d.balance_day <= p.fixed_on
group by p.paid_on, p.in_bank_by
order by p.paid_on;

Its daily step, with a running balance added on top, returns this.

Day	Into the balance	Balance at close
5 Oct	-$18.00	-$18.00
6 Oct	$43.40	$25.40
7 Oct	-$18.00	$7.40
8 Oct	-$18.00	-$10.60
9 Oct	-$18.00	-$28.60
11 Oct	$118.15	$89.55
12 Oct	$46.90	$136.45
14 Oct	$205.60	$342.05
17 Oct	$88.25	$430.30

On the run day the balance is $28.60 below zero while $458.90 sits in deferred transactions. The final step returns the cash by the day it reaches the bank. The reserve row comes from listBalances, not from the query.

Paid on	In the bank by	Amount	Held on 9 October, before costs
15 Oct	22 Oct	$136.45	$165.05
29 Oct	5 Nov	$293.85	$293.85
Account level reserve	No date	$250.00

Order 4 is the one to notice. It releases on 14 October, the day after the 15 October payout’s cut-off, so it waits for the 29 October payout and reaches the bank by 5 November, 30 days after delivery. With Express Payout the two arrivals move to 16 and 30 October. Advertising from 10 October onward is your budget, not Amazon’s record, and goes in as your own line. The payout is the net of everything that moved on the balance, the same shape as a Shopify payout, which post 02 ties back to its orders.

How should the money Amazon holds sit in your books?

As revenue when the customer gets control of the goods, and from then until it lands as money Amazon owes you, a receivable in our reading. Not as revenue on the day Amazon releases it. Finaloop, a vendor, says cash basis books follow the release date instead. The account level reserve is the same kind of asset, held for a different reason.

FRS 102, a UK standard, says in paragraph 23.78 that a good “is transferred when (or as) the customer obtains control of that good or service”, and Amazon’s hold does not move that date. Paragraph 23.127 says “A right to consideration is unconditional if only the passage of time is required before payment of that consideration is due. For example, an entity would recognise a trade receivable if it has a present right to payment even though that amount may be subject to refund in the future.” Deloitte’s revenue roadmap states the same rule for ASC 606. No standard setter or Big Four guide we read classifies Amazon’s held balance itself, so the receivable is our reading. Amazon’s own page maps its reports the same way, the Transaction report to “what you earned in a period” and Statements to “what cash you received”.

The vendors agree on the asset and not on the date. A2X, Link My Books and Finaloop all book the held balance as an asset, and A2X says the same of reserves, “money Amazon owes to sellers”. A2X accrues deferred sales “when the order occurs”, Finaloop on the “fulfillment (delivery) date”, and Link My Books by “order or transaction date within the month”, so the post names no date.

So a working setup reads the held balance every day with its release dates, turns it into a cash forecast dated to the bank, shows the reserve beside it as the line without a date, and keeps revenue on delivery in the books. That is back office data moving between Amazon and your books on a schedule, which is our ERP Automation work.

FAQ

How long does Amazon hold your money? A sale until seven days after delivery as standard, then the next payout and up to five business days in transit. The reserve until what it covers is resolved.

What is a deferred transaction, and when does Amazon release it? A sale you have earned that is not yet available for payout, released seven days after delivery into your Amazon balance.

What is the account level reserve, and how is it different? Money held against claims, chargebacks, performance, a review or tax withholding, with no release date.

Where can I download deferred transactions with their release dates? Nowhere that Amazon documents. The API’s maturityDate is the only documented source of a future release date.

How do you turn the held money into a cash forecast? Read each held order’s maturityDate daily, add the payout cut-off and the transfer time, and sum by the day the money lands.

How should the money Amazon holds sit in your books? As revenue when the customer gets the goods, and as money owed to you until it lands, in our reading.

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Written by Stavros Symeonidis, founding engineer at otum.