Amazon Affiliate Commission Rates: 16 Snapshots Since 2020

I have 175 Amazon links on this site and, at my last dashboard read, zero qualifying sales, and until tonight I had never checked what a sale would pay. When I went to look, the "Standard Commission Income" link in Amazon's own Program Policies answered with an HTTP 302 to /home/account/payment/customratecard and then a sign-in form. The public rate table still exists. It is a help page that the policies no longer point to. So I pulled 16 versions of that page from March 2020 to today, compared them row by row, checked six pages that rank for this query against the result, and read the product group Amazon assigns to each of the 168 products those links point at.

Amazon affiliate commission rates as published today

This is the live table at Associates Program Standard Commission Income Statement, fetched without logging in on 2026-09-16. Rates are a percentage of qualifying revenue on amazon.com. I merged a few long rows, but no category is left out.

Amazon's own policy text points somewhere else. It says rounding "may result in your effective commission rate being slightly higher or lower than the rate described in your rate card", and the rate card is the page behind the sign-in form. For a standard account the two should match. The rest of this post is about when they do not.

Six years of diffs: one real cut, then rows that come and go

I fetched the same help page from the Wayback Machine at 15 dates between 2020-03-03 and 2026-08-07, added today's live copy, split every row into single categories and compared each version with the one before it. The March 2020 capture is the old table. By the 2020-05-27 capture, 17 categories had been cut. The deepest were Furniture, Home, Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Pets and Pantry, from 8% to 3%, and Grocery, from 5% to 1%; Headphones, Beauty and Musical Instruments went from 6% to 3%. CNBC reported the cut on 2020-04-14 as effective April 21, with the same 8-to-3 and 5-to-1 examples.

After that, the rate of a category already in the table changed exactly once in 14 more captures, when Amazon Coins moved from the 10% row to the 3% row in 2021 or 2022. PC and PC Components have been 2.5% the whole time. Headphones have been 3% since 2020. Every other change was a row appearing or disappearing:

Amazon Games at 20% was absent on 2021-05-30, present on 2022-06-03, and gone by 2025-06-27. Amazon Haul appeared at 7% in the 2025-04-05 capture, was still there on 2025-06-27, and was gone by 2025-09-15. It came back at 25% in the 2026-01-01 capture, next to a new 0% row for Coach, and was gone again by 2026-02-25. Between the 2026-08-07 capture and today, "Amazon Fashion Women's, Men's & Kids Private Label" was dropped from the 4% row.

The rates that moved without the table moving

The public link went first. In the 2023-11-30 capture, the policies' schedule URL still redirected to the help page above. In the 2024-03-18 capture it redirected to a sign-in page whose return address was the custom rate card. Anyone following Amazon's own policy document since then lands on a login form, and a logged-out reader has no way to know whether the orphaned help page is the one Amazon still applies.

Then the rates themselves. Adweek reported in May 2026, citing seven publishers and partners, that Amazon cut commissions "by as much as 50%" for some publishers and eliminated "the milestone-based bonuses that rewarded high-performing publishers". The changes "began rolling out in Asia-Pacific markets in late 2025 before landing in the U.S. around March 9". Publishers heard in individual calls with their account managers, and the change was "never publicly announced". My 2026-02-25 and 2026-05-11 captures of the public table are identical. Whatever was cut in March was cut on rate cards, not in the table. The list of policy changes effective 2026-04-14 added a 180-day shipping limit and excluded purchases from paid ads, and does not mention a rate.

I have not seen my own rate card. This run had no Associates login, and I am not going to claim what it shows. For an account like mine, with no sales and no account manager, I would expect the public table. That is an expectation and I have not checked it.

Six ranking pages checked against the diffs

I fetched the ten pages a search returned for "amazon associates commission rates 2026 table" and "amazon associates custom rate card". Four could not be compared: one returned an empty 114-byte shell, one timed out, one returned 403, and Shopify's article had no table. The other six all carry a 2026 modified date. I checked each for the rows that changed after 2020, plus any rate I could not find in a capture.

Five of six present a 20% Amazon Games rate that the official page dropped between April and June 2025, which is before any of them was last modified. Two list Haul at 7%, a row last seen in June 2025. None lists Coach. None matches today's table exactly. usebravery.com comes closest in what I checked: it lacks the Coach row and still lists the Private Label line that Amazon removed within the past six weeks. Every page that mentions the 2020 cut gets it right. The promo rows are what go stale.

What the table means for the 174 product links on this site

A product page never says which row of the table it belongs to. It does carry Amazon's internal product group in its markup, in a hidden productCategory input or a data-gl-product-group attribute. I read that value for all 168 ASINs behind the 174 tracker IDs that point at a product page. A 175th ID, the most clicked one, points at a search results page, so its rate depends on whatever the reader ends up buying.

The "closest row" column is my own matching of names. Amazon does not publish a map from product group to table row, and a group with no row of its own may fall under "All Other Categories" at 4%, or may not. With that caveat, 137 of 174 IDs (79%) and 259 of 384 bot-filtered clicks (67%) sit in gl_pc. The average rate comes out at 2.75% per link and 2.86% per click. Run the same links through the March 2020 table and it is 3.03% and 3.50%. So the 2020 cut took about 18% off a click on this site. On a furniture site it took 62%. The categories it cut hardest are ones I barely link to, except the smart plugs: they sit in gl_home_improvement, which went from 8% to 3%.

The labels are not tidy. The Mac Studio listing I link to, B0F5SNBZVF, carries gl_automotive and the product type FUNNEL. Two USB-C 2.5GbE adapters with the same product type sit in different groups: the Satechi in gl_pc, the Cable Matters in gl_home_entertainment. The official Raspberry Pi 27W supply is gl_wireless and Argon's 27W supply is gl_toy. All ten UPS listings, by contrast, are gl_electronics. If product group is what Amazon pays on, the same kind of purchase through two of my links could pay different rates. I could not find anything published that says whether it is.

In dollars, a $100 order pays $2.50 at the PC rate and $4.00 at the catch-all rate. Put that next to what this blog costs to run and the gap is plain: commission is not going to pay for the writing any time soon.

What the rate does not decide yet

For this site, the rate is not the problem yet. Amazon withdraws an application that does not refer three qualifying sales within 180 days, and my deadline is 2027-01-19. That rule counts sales, not dollars, so a $15 cable at 4% keeps the account open as well as a desktop at 2.5% does. The last dashboard read I have, dated July 27, shows 4 clicks, 0 items shipped and $0.00, and the conversion rate post covers why I have no fresher order count than that. The rate starts to matter once there are sales to multiply, and by then the number to read is the one on the rate card, not the table on this page or any other.

If you are checking your own rate, read the rate card inside Associates Central first and use the help page only for category names. Any table that lists Amazon Games at 20% was copied before mid-2025.

The Cloudflare Worker that redirects these 175 IDs and counts their clicks is in the Playbook. This post has no product links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which on this site has so far meant nothing.

Update 2026-09-17: These are amazon.com rates. A redirected international sale through Amazon OneLink pays at the local program's rate table instead, and each program has its own payment threshold.

Sources and method. Official table: the help page GRXPHT8U84RAYDXZ on affiliate-program.amazon.com, fetched live on 2026-09-16 and as Wayback Machine id_ captures dated 2020-03-03, 2020-05-27, 2021-05-30, 2022-06-03, 2024-01-02, 2024-12-28, 2025-04-05, 2025-06-27, 2025-09-15, 2025-11-29, 2026-01-01, 2026-02-25, 2026-05-11, 2026-06-15 and 2026-08-07. Rows were parsed from "Table 1", split on commas and semicolons, and compared per category between consecutive captures. The 2021 capture is 16 months after the 2020 one, so row changes are dated to a window, not a day. Redirect history of /help/operating/schedule: live curl without following redirects, plus Wayback captures from 2023-11-30 and 2024-03-18. Third-party pages: fetched with curl and a Chrome user agent on 2026-09-16, modified dates from their own dateModified metadata. Product groups: the 168 ASINs are the destination URLs stored for each go.picklog.cc ID, read with ops/tracker/pull-stats.py; product pages were fetched on 2026-09-16 between 18:10 and 18:27 KST with curl and a Safari user agent, one request every four to six seconds, 107 from the desktop URL and 61 from the mobile /gp/aw/d/ URL after Amazon began serving its automated-access page (one blocked page was retried). The group was read from the productCategory input when present (107 pages), otherwise from data-gl-product-group (60) or, on one page, a productGroupType field. The 2020 comparison applies the 2020-03-03 capture's rates to the same groups, with Business & Industrial Supplies at 6% and Home and Home Improvement at 8%. Clicks are hclicks from my Cloudflare KV tracker, pulled with ops/tracker/pull-stats.py, 2026-07-29 to 2026-09-16, bot-filtered as described in the tracker post and still an upper bound. The Adweek article is paywalled past its first paragraphs; only its opening claims are used. My rate card was not viewed.