Amazon has published its Holiday 2026 deadline calendar: deal submissions for Prime Big Deal Days close September 8, and the last FBA inbound cutoff for that event is September 16. The first hard date is earlier than that — AWD shipments have to arrive by September 2. Amazon posted the calendar to Seller Central on July 7; what it has not posted is when Prime Big Deal Days actually runs. You commit stock and deals to an event with no announced date.

What changed

The Holiday 2026 seller calendar is out, and the dates are the same across every outlet that has reported it — EcomCrew on July 7, Ordoro on July 16, and PPC Land again today, each citing Amazon’s Seller Central announcement.

Prime Big Deal Days:

  • Deal submissions: open July 8, close September 8. Submit by August 5 for the early-submission discount.
  • AWD inbound: September 2.
  • FBA inbound, minimal shipment splits: September 9.
  • FBA inbound, Amazon-optimized splits: September 16.

Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday:

  • Deal submissions: close October 20. Early-submission discount deadline September 5.
  • AWD inbound: October 14.
  • FBA inbound, minimal shipment splits: October 21.
  • FBA inbound, Amazon-optimized splits: October 28.

Deal fees are unchanged from last year: $100 per promotion upfront, plus 1.5% of promotional sales, capped at $5,000.

And the peak fulfilment window stands: October 15, 2026 through January 14, 2027 — the surcharge we covered when the fees landed.

What is missing from the calendar is the events themselves. As of today Amazon has not announced dates for Prime Big Deal Days, and it has not announced its Black Friday Week window either. Black Friday falls on November 27 by the calendar; that is arithmetic, not an Amazon announcement.

What it means for a private-label seller

The sequencing is the story. Your deal submissions close September 8 and your inventory has to be in by September 16 — but you are choosing which ASINs to discount, and how deep, without knowing whether the event is the first week of October or the third. That gap costs you in two specific ways.

First, sell-through math. If you stock for an event you assume is October 7 and it runs October 20, you carry two extra weeks of inventory at pre-peak storage, then hit the October 15 peak fee window before the event even starts. The units you sent for the deal get fulfilled at the higher rate.

Second, the ad ramp. The usual play is to build ranking velocity into the deal window — raise budgets and bids roughly two weeks out so you enter the event with momentum. You can’t time a ramp against a date you don’t have. Ramping too early burns spend at normal-demand conversion rates; too late and the deal runs while your placements are still climbing.

The trade-off nobody names: the safe answer is to send inventory to the earliest cutoff and keep ad spend flat until Amazon confirms. That is genuinely safer, and it genuinely costs you — earlier inbound means more days of storage fees on stock that isn’t selling yet, and flat spend means you enter the event colder than a competitor who guessed right. There is no version of this where you don’t pay for Amazon’s silence. Pick which way you’d rather pay.

One more thing worth noticing: the two FBA cutoffs are a week apart, and the difference is whether you let Amazon split your shipment. Minimal splits costs you September 9; letting Amazon optimize the splits buys you to September 16. That extra week is real, and most sellers who miss the deadline miss it by days.

What to do about it

  • Work backwards from September 2, not September 16. AWD is the earliest cutoff, and if any of your Q4 stock routes through Amazon Warehousing and Distribution, that is your real deadline. Everything upstream — PO, production, freight booking — has to clear it.
  • Decide your split preference now, deliberately. If your freight timeline is tight, accepting Amazon-optimized splits buys you a week. If your prep economics depend on single-destination shipments, you’re on September 9 and you should be booking now.
  • Submit deals before August 5. The early deadline carries a discount on the deal fee, and there is no downside to submitting early — you can still manage the promotion afterwards.
  • Model the deal at peak fee, not today’s fee. A deal discount stacked on the October 15 peak surcharge is where a Q4 promotion turns into a Q4 loss. Run the break-even on the discounted price with the peak fulfilment cost in, per ASIN, before you commit.
  • Don’t build the ad plan around a rumoured date. Build it as a trigger: budgets and bids step up on confirmation, not on a guess. Have the campaign changes staged so the ramp is a switch you flip, not a plan you write in October.

Sources

Amazon’s Holiday 2026 announcement is inside Seller Central and isn’t publicly linkable. The deadlines above are reported identically by three independent outlets, each citing that announcement:

Confirm your own cutoffs in Seller Central — they depend on your shipment plan and fulfilment centre, and the calendar dates are the outer bound, not a promise about your specific shipment.