Amazon DD+7 Payouts: When Funds Are Released and How to Plan Liquidity

For most Amazon sellers the cash problem is not a profit problem: the item sells profitably, but the money is not in hand yet. The order closes, the customer receives it, the amount shows in the panel — and the disbursable balance still says “pending”. The rule behind this is Amazon’s delivery-date based payout policy, known among sellers as DD+7. This article covers what the policy actually says (and a common misreading of it), when the reserve grows beyond it, which Seller Central report shows the held amount, and how to turn the waiting period into a liquidity plan.

DD+7 in one sentence: seven calendar days, available on the eighth

Amazon’s seller announcement is explicit: funds become available for disbursement seven days after delivery is confirmed. The German-language announcement says the same thing with “7 Tage” — not “Werktage” (business days).

What settles the day type is Amazon’s own worked example: an item sold on 1 January and delivered on 3 January becomes available for disbursement on 11 January. That window includes a weekend; on a business-day reading the date would land much later. So the rule counts calendar days, and in practice the balance becomes available on the 8th day after delivery.

Short rule: delivery date + 8 days = available date. The “seven business days” reading that circulates in some agency blogs and forums does not match Amazon’s own example; build your calendar on business days and you push every order’s available date several days too far out.

What the policy is called, and where it lives

In German the official name is “Auszahlungen basierend auf dem Lieferdatum”, and inside the panel it appears as “Richtlinie zum Lieferdatum”. The abbreviation “DDBR” you see in English write-ups comes from secondary sources; do not look for it on Amazon’s German surface — you will not find a menu with that name.

The official help page sits in the Seller Central help centre and is readable only when signed in. So verify every number against your own account: everything below explains the mechanism, not the conditions specific to you.

This is not a new freeze — it is a calendar you have to build correctly

The policy is often framed as “Amazon started freezing sellers’ money in 2026”. Factually the picture is different: according to an Amazon spokesperson quoted in the press, 95% of sellers already operate under this standard policy. The remaining small share are accounts still on a payout policy that predates 2016.

Migrating those legacy accounts has been postponed several times. The first deadline was 30 September 2025; the best-supported current date is 12 March 2026 — it appears both in Amazon’s own forum announcement and in trade press. The 5 March 2026 date circulating on some blogs is a secondary relay; do not plan as if the two were one date.

The practical takeaway: if your account is already on DD+7, March 2026 is a non-event for you. If you are on the legacy policy, the only thing that changes is when the money is released — not how much you earn. To keep the profit side separate, the Amazon profit calculator handles that; this article is about timing.

Beyond DD+7: the three documented triggers for a larger reserve

The wait is not always capped at 8 days. Amazon.de’s own announcement lists three situations in which an account-level reserve applies:

• A-to-z guarantee claim: when a claim is filed on an order.
• Chargeback: when a payment dispute is raised.
• Account under review: while your account is being reviewed.

In addition, the account keeps showing under an account-level reserve until the older transactions are released.

Warning about the reserve table circulating online: the tiers you keep seeing — “Tier I / Tier II / Tier II-Plus”, “100% of the last 7 days”, “3% of daily transactions” — belong to the Amazon Pay reserve policy, and that page says so explicitly. They do not define a marketplace seller’s reserve. Many blogs republish that table under an “Amazon account level reserve” heading aimed at marketplace sellers — planning with it means planning with the wrong model.

So how much is held, and for how long? Amazon does not publish a formula for marketplace selling. The triggers are documented; the magnitude is not. Treat numbers like “an A-to-z claim adds 14 days” as unverified, and read the actual figure from the report in your own account instead — the exact path is below.

Where to see the held money in Seller Central

The best part of this policy for planning purposes: you do not have to guess. Amazon states an expected payment date for every pending transaction. The exact path from the Amazon.de announcement:

1. Repository für Abrechnungsberichte (settlement report repository) → report type: “Zurückgestellte Transaktion” (deferred transaction) → “Bericht anfordern” (request report).
2. Quick view in the panel: the Zahlungen (Payments) overview page, top “Gesamtsaldo” (total balance) box — the DD+7 reserve appears there as “zurückgestellte Transaktionen”.
3. Filter: transaction status “Zurückgestellte Transaktionen” → “Aktualisieren” (refresh) → all pending transactions plus the expected payment date for each one.

The report contains the list of orders making up the pending balance, the reason for the deferral per order, and an estimated release date per order. Once a transaction is released it drops off this report and moves to the regular Transaktionsbericht.

On the request side, the announcement is equally specific: disbursement on demand is possible up to once per day. So even if your requestable balance is 0 inside the reserve window, you can claim released funds daily rather than waiting for a cycle.

The wait is a pipeline, not a loss — with numbers

The key to reading DD+7 correctly: it is a delay, not a deduction. For a seller with steady sales, money keeps arriving every day after the initial transition; a fixed amount simply stays in the pipeline at all times. That amount is a one-off working capital requirement, not a recurring cost.

Example (invented numbers, not an Amazon figure): take a store producing an average of €2,000 in net payout per day, with an average delivery time of 2 days (a number you measure yourself — Amazon does not provide it).

• Order day → delivery: 2 days
• Delivery → available: 8 days (after the seven calendar days, on the 8th)
• Total pipeline: 10 days → permanently in transit: 10 × €2,000 = €20,000

That €20,000 is not lost money; while €2,000 arrives each day, another €2,000 of new orders enters the front of the pipeline. The critical moment is growth: if your daily payout goes from €2,000 to €4,000, the pipeline goes from €20,000 to €40,000. That extra €20,000 has to be financed out of the growth itself — the week you raise ad and inventory budgets is exactly the week the pipeline grows too, and ignoring that is where the cash squeeze happens.

The same logic applies to campaign periods: the revenue spike arrives a few days before the cash spike. To see what is left per product, Real Profit X-Ray answers one question; to see which week the money lands, the Cash Flow Calendar answers another — they should not be conflated.

FBA or FBM? The only thing that changes is when the clock starts

The policy applies to both fulfilment methods; the reserve calculation is not different. The difference is delivery speed: with FBA orders are typically delivered faster, so the seven-day counter starts earlier. With self-shipped (FBM/MFN) orders, transit time is added up front, so under the same policy your money is released later.

The “order-to-bank takes X days on FBA and Y days on FBM” ranges circulating online are blog estimates, not Amazon figures. The right approach: measure your own average delivery time and put it into the formula above. If you want to compare FBA against your own shipping on the cost side, the FBA vs FBM comparison tool separates fulfilment and storage items — but note it compares cost, not timing.

From CSV export plus Excel pivot to a rolling projection

Today most sellers solve this by downloading the settlement report as CSV once a month, building a pivot in Excel, and working out by hand which week brings what. That works and gives the right number — with two weak spots:

• It goes stale. A pivot is a snapshot of the day you downloaded it; every order delivered the next day changes the table, and the table does not update itself.
• It misses sales not yet attached to a payment plan. Sales that have settled but have no payment order yet are either absent from the pivot or shown as if they were confirmed amounts. Both are wrong: the first understates the plan, the second overstates it.

A rolling projection handles this instead. Verimle’s Cash Flow Calendar buckets confirmed payment orders into weeks by payment date, and adds sales without a payment plan yet by shifting them with your historical median lag, labelled separately as “estimated”. Confirmed and estimated never go in the same box — so you do not build a plan on a certainty you do not have. If you also need the month’s items in one file for your accountant, the accounting summary export covers the tax side of the same data.

If you are asking the same question on other channels, Hepsiburada payout terms and Trendyol payment terms walk through the same logic under those marketplaces’ rules.

Three frequently asked questions

Is DD+7 seven business days?

No. Amazon’s text says “seven days”, and its own example (delivered 3 January → available 11 January) spans a weekend, so the count is in calendar days. A calendar built on business days puts the available date several days later than it actually is.

Can I speed the payout up?

You do not have to wait for a cycle to claim a released balance: per Amazon’s announcement, disbursement on demand is possible up to once per day. But that does not shorten the reserve — the seven-day window runs independently of how often you request.

How much is held on an A-to-z claim, and for how long?

Amazon does not publish a formula for marketplace selling: the triggers are documented, the amount and duration are not. The only correct source is the deferred transaction report, which states the deferral reason and the estimated release date for that specific order. Do not put day counts from blogs into your plan.

Conclusion: do not estimate, build the calendar from the report

DD+7 is not a complicated policy; what is complicated is turning it into a weekly cash plan. Three steps are enough: (1) get the rule right — delivery plus 8 calendar days; (2) read the reserve situations from the report’s own reason field, not from guesswork; (3) multiply the pipeline by your own average delivery time and add it to your growth plan. If you would rather have a system track this than redo it by hand every month, the Cash Flow Calendar splits confirmed and estimated inflows into weeks with separate labels.

Important note: the amounts here are examples, not figures published by Amazon; average delivery time, payout calendar, and reserve conditions vary by account, marketplace, and fulfilment method. The calculation in this article is a model. Always verify the dates and held amounts that apply to you from the payment screens of your own Amazon Seller Central account and from the “Zurückgestellte Transaktion” report; the official policy text lives on the “Auszahlungen basierend auf dem Lieferdatum” help page, which is available to signed-in sellers. To test net profit per product with your own numbers, use the Amazon profit calculator.