If you sell ebooks through Amazon KDP, one of the platform’s longest-standing pricing rules just changed. As of 7 July 2026, the KDP 70% royalty band now runs from $2.99 to $12.99 on Amazon.com, up from the old $2.99 to $9.99 range. That $9.99 ceiling had been in place since Amazon introduced its 70% royalty option back in 2010, so the number has finally budged after about fifteen years of sitting still.
It’s part of a broader run of 2026 KDP changes, alongside the DRM, AI-disclosure and ACX shifts covered in Four 2026 KDP and ACX Changes Every Indie Author Should Know.
Before you dash off to reprice anything, here’s the honest headline: for most authors this changes nothing at all. For one particular group of books, though, it’s worth a five-minute check this week.
The new KDP 70% royalty band: $2.99 to $12.99
The mechanics are simple enough. Price a book anywhere from $2.99 to $12.99 on the 70% royalty option and it now earns 70%. Go above $12.99, or below $2.99, and you drop to the 35% option, exactly as before. The $2.99 floor hasn’t moved, and the 35% option itself is untouched.
This applies across the KDP marketplaces, not just the US store. On Amazon.co.uk the 70% band now runs from £1.77 to £12.99, and the eurozone stores sit at €2.69 to €12.99. Amazon sets these as fixed local price points rather than live currency conversions, which is why the numbers don’t quite line up from one store to the next.
And nothing on your existing titles changes automatically. Prices and royalty choices stay as they are until you go in and change them yourself. Translated editions created through Kindle Translate inherit whatever price and royalty option you set on the original.
Nothing changes if you’re priced $2.99 to $9.99
If your ebooks sit between $2.99 and $9.99 on the 70% option, which is where the bulk of genre fiction lives, this announcement is a non-event. Same price, same royalty, same everything. You don’t need to touch a thing.
The change only matters to two groups: authors who were pricing above $9.99 and swallowing the 35% penalty to do it, and anyone who’d been holding a book down at $9.99 purely to protect the 70% rate.
Who the $12.99 ceiling actually helps
Three kinds of book stand to gain.
Box sets and omnibus editions. This is the big one. A three or four book bundle often wants to sit above $9.99 to reflect its value, but until now that meant dropping to 35%. You can now price a bundle up to $12.99 and keep the full 70%. Trade coverage since the change suggests box sets are the first thing authors are repricing.
Longer or premium non-fiction. Reference guides, business books and the like already command higher paperback prices, and their buyers tend to be less price-sensitive when a book promises a clear return. Here the ebook royalty band was the thing lagging behind what readers were willing to pay.
Premium niche fiction. Epic fantasy doorstoppers and other high-value titles where $9.99 always felt like an artificial cap.
The maths: what a $12.99 ebook pays at 70%
Here’s why it matters in cash terms. Take a book priced at $12.99. Under the old rules it could only use the 35% option, paying about $4.55 a copy. On the 70% option it now pays roughly $9.03, after the small delivery fee. That’s a gain of about $4.48 on every single sale, for a book you don’t even have to reprice.
| List price | 35% royalty | 70% royalty (net of delivery) |
| $9.99 (old ceiling) | $3.50 | $6.93 |
| $10.99 | $3.85 | $7.63 |
| $12.99 (new ceiling) | $4.55 | $9.03 |
At $9.99 and below, nothing has changed. It’s the $10.00 to $12.99 band that’s just opened up.
Mind the delivery fee on the 70% option
One wrinkle catches people out: the 70% option carries a delivery fee, and the 35% option doesn’t. Amazon charges $0.15 per megabyte in the US (£0.10 in the UK), based on your file size rather than your price. For a normal text-only novel of a few hundred kilobytes, the fee lands around six cents, which is why the 70% royalty still wins so comfortably. A heavily illustrated book, or a chunky box set carrying lots of images, is a different story. Bigger file, bigger fee. Worth a glance before you assume 70% always comes out ahead.
The cleanest move is a switch, not a reprice
If you already have a book priced between $10.99 and $12.99 on the 35% option, the simplest win is to switch the royalty option to 70% at the same price. No repricing, no resetting your sales rank or review history, no signal to Amazon’s system that the price moved. Just a higher rate on the price you already have. That’s the first thing worth checking in your bookshelf.
If you’re tempted to push a $9.99 book up to $12.99 to grab the bigger royalty, do the sums on volume first. Going from $9.99 to $12.99 is a 30% price rise, and if sales fall by more than the royalty gain, your total income can still drop. A higher rate isn’t the same as higher revenue.
And none of this touches Kindle Unlimited. KU page reads are paid from the monthly Global Fund on a per-page basis, independent of your list price or royalty option, so nothing about your KU earnings changes here.
Amazon is catching up, not leading
A bit of context. This is Amazon closing a gap rather than opening one. Kobo already pays 70% up to $12.99 through Kobo Writing Life, so Amazon has matched it rather than beaten it. Apple Books and Barnes & Noble Press go further still, paying a flat 70% at any price with no ceiling at all. So the change is welcome, but plenty of authors have pointed out that Amazon stopped short. There were hopes the band might stretch to $14.99 or even $19.99. It didn’t.
Watch for out-of-date royalty calculators
One practical warning. The $9.99 rule stood for so long that plenty of pricing guides, royalty calculators and popular author-tool sites still show the old ceiling. In the days since the change, several well-known calculators were still telling authors $9.99 was the top of the 70% band. If you reach for a third-party calculator this week, check it reflects the new $12.99 figure before you trust its numbers.
What to check in your KDP bookshelf this week
Five minutes covers the lot:
- Find any title priced between $10.99 and $12.99 on the 35% option, and switch it to 70%.
- Run an eye over your box sets and omnibus editions, and decide whether a higher price with the full royalty now makes sense.
- Leave everything priced $2.99 to $9.99 exactly where it is.
That’s the whole change. Not a revolution, but for the right books it’s real money, and it’s been a long time coming.
Keep reading: The KDP title creation limit is now two per format a week, The ACX legacy royalty model ends this year.