Amazon Account Health Rating Explained: How to Protect Your Seller Account

The Account Health Rating sits at the top of the Account Health page in Seller Central, with a separate score for each Amazon store you sell in. For a brand turning over tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds a month, it is the closest thing to an early warning before Amazon stops your sales. The Amazon rules and numbers below come from its UK help pages, checked in October 2026.

What is the Amazon Account Health Rating?

The Account Health Rating (AHR) is a colour-coded score from 0 to 1,000 that shows your seller account’s risk of deactivation for breaking certain Amazon selling policies. You lose points when Amazon detects a new policy violation and gain them back when you address it (Amazon AHR programme policy).

Score	Status	What Amazon says it means
200–1,000	Green: Healthy	Not at risk of deactivation under the policies in the score
100–199	Yellow: At Risk	At risk of deactivation
0–99	Red: Unhealthy	Eligible for deactivation, or already deactivated

Four details that matter in practice:

• New sellers start at 200, right on the Healthy line.
• The score covers the last 180 days of policy adherence and selling activity, and updates in near real time.
• Each store has its own score, so check every store you sell in, not just your home store.
• A Healthy score is not immunity. Amazon can still deactivate an account immediately for suspected fraud or other harmful activity, if the law requires it, or for breaking policies outside the AHR.

How is the Account Health Rating calculated?

Amazon publishes the outline of the formula, though not the exact point values (AHR FAQ):

• Every account starts at 200.
• Each violation deducts points by severity, “typically” between two and eight.
• Repeat violations of the same policy cost more each time, and the deduction sometimes doubles.
• A critical violation takes the score straight to zero.
• You gain 4 points for every 200 orders fulfilled successfully in the last 180 days.
• Sellers with Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) orders can also earn points for their Buyer Contact Rate, Average Contact Response Time and Buyer Dissatisfaction Rate. Amazon says below-average results on these won’t restrict your selling.

Because both violations and orders roll out of the 180-day window, your score can move even when nothing new has happened.

Worked example: why volume helps, and where it stops helping

Illustrative numbers. Amazon doesn’t publish exact point values.

	Small account	Larger account
Orders in the last 180 days	1,000	24,000 (about £100k a month at a £25 average order)
Starting score	200	200
Points from orders (4 per 200)	+20	+480
Score before violations	220	680
First IP complaint (say −8)	212	672
Repeat IP complaint, doubled (−16)	196: At Risk	656: Healthy

Volume buys a buffer against ordinary violations. It buys no buffer against a critical violation, which takes either account to zero, or against hitting the repeat limit for one policy (see below). That is why large, busy accounts still get deactivated.

What lowers your Account Health Rating?

The AHR counts violations of 14 policies, including intellectual property, anti-counterfeiting, product detail page rules, restricted products, customer product reviews, product condition, and product safety and compliance (Amazon’s list). Amazon sorts each violation into a severity level:

Severity	Amazon’s examples	What happens
Critical	Counterfeit confirmed by a test buy; asking for reviews or using non-compliant inserts; trying to damage another seller; manipulating search results or sales rank	Score goes to zero; three days to address it before deactivation
High	A rights owner’s valid infringement notice; customer reports of infringing or counterfeit products	Minimal tolerance
Medium	Listings with links that send shoppers to external websites	Damages trust if repeated
Low	A customer reports an expired product or wrong condition, such as used sold as new	Tolerated if infrequent
No impact	Listing issues flagged for you to fix	No effect on the score for now

Repeat limits are the hidden risk. If you reach the maximum number of repeat violations for one policy within 180 days, a critical violation appears and your score drops to zero. Amazon sets that maximum at five for infringement-related policies and two for restricted products (AHR FAQ). Restricted-product flags are easy to repeat by accident: a word such as “antibacterial” in a listing can get a product gated as a pesticide, so fix the wording across the whole catalogue, not just the flagged ASIN.

Does Order Defect Rate count towards the Account Health Rating?

Not directly. Order Defect Rate (ODR) and the delivery metrics are separate targets under Amazon’s Order Performance policy, shown on the same Account Health page, and missing them can still cost you selling privileges.

Metric	Amazon’s target	Measured over	Applies to
Order Defect Rate (negative feedback, A-to-z claims, chargebacks)	Under 1%	60 days	All orders
Cancellation Rate	Under 2.5%	7 days	FBM
Late Dispatch Rate	Under 4%	10 or 30 days	FBM
Valid Tracking Rate	Over 95%	30 days	FBM
On-Time Delivery Rate	At least 90% expected	See Amazon’s on-time delivery policy	FBM

ODR is where FBM sellers get hurt by refund abuse and A-to-z claims. If that is happening to you, our guide to protecting an FBM store from use-and-refund scammers covers the defences.

Unclear listings also feed complaints and negative feedback. One brand we worked with had a 12.55% refund rate, largely from shoppers misunderstanding product dimensions, usage or installation. After we rewrote the listings and images for accuracy, the refund rate fell to 7.59%, a 40% reduction.

How should you respond to an Account Health warning?

Act on the same day, starting with the most severe violation. Amazon’s guidance is to address every violation on the Account Health page promptly, highest severity first. Once a fix is confirmed, the score updates within a few hours.

1. Read the violation in full: policy, severity, affected ASINs and the date. A critical violation gives you three days.
2. Choose the right route:
   • Dispute if Amazon made a mistake, with evidence.
   • Appeal if you did break the policy but not on purpose.
   • Fix the cause, for example remove infringing content.
   • Ask the rights owner to retract an IP complaint, if it was filed in error or you’ve reached an agreement.
3. Don’t just delete the listing. Amazon says closing or deleting a listing does not remove the violation.
4. Talk to Amazon. Professional sellers can reach Account Health Support through Contact us or Call me now on the Account Health page.
5. Keep your emergency number verified under Notification Preferences. Amazon may call you during the three-day window, and an unanswered call matters: if you don’t address At Risk violations and Amazon can’t reach you, the account will most likely be deactivated.

Violations normally drop off after 180 days. But if your account is deactivated because of the AHR, they stay on the page until you address them. The account is reinstated once the score is back to 100 or higher.

How to write an appeal Amazon accepts

A good appeal (often called a plan of action) explains what went wrong, what you have fixed and how you’ll stop it happening again, with evidence. Amazon’s appeal guidelines ask you to:

• Be clear and concise. Stick to facts and skip the company history and emotive language.
• Explain every issue and its root cause, such as unverifiable suppliers, inventory management or quality control.
• List specific actions with dates.
• Send evidence for every ASIN under review. Some products need invoices from the last 365 days.
• Highlight what matters in your documents: ASINs, supplier names, relevant clauses.

Submit through the Account Health page (Reactivate your account, or the violation’s own appeal link); Amazon says to expect a reply within two days. A skeleton that works for most listing violations:

• Root cause: what happened, on which ASINs, and why your process allowed it.
• Actions taken: each fix, with the date it was made.
• Prevention: the check you’ve added (who does it, how often) so it can’t recur.

Account Health Assurance: aim for 250, not 200

Account Health Assurance (AHA) is Amazon’s extra protection for sellers who keep a high score. Professional sellers qualify with an AHR of 250 or higher for at least six months, with no more than 10 days below 250, and a verified emergency contact number. Once you’re enrolled, Amazon says it will not deactivate your account as long as you work with it within 72 hours of being contacted about an issue (AHA FAQ).

You lose AHA if your score stays below 250 for more than 10 consecutive days, if you repeat the same compliance issues, or if you don’t meet regulatory obligations in the stores where you sell. That last point is why EU compliance matters: missing EPR numbers or GPSR details on Amazon’s European stores show up as compliance problems (see selling on Amazon Europe from the UK).

A weekly routine that keeps the score healthy

Many violations start as small catalogue or process mistakes. A short weekly check catches them while they are cheap to fix.

• Every week: review the Account Health page, the Product Policy Compliance tab and Performance Notifications for every store you sell in.
• Before any listing edit: check claims against restricted-product rules, use only brand names you own or are authorised to use, and remove any links to external websites.
• Reviews and inserts: request reviews only through Amazon’s tools, and never offer incentives or use inserts that break the customer reviews policy. Amazon rates review solicitation and non-compliant inserts as critical violations.
• Suppliers: keep invoices for at least the last 365 days, matched to ASINs.
• Brand protection: enrol in Brand Registry so you control your own listings (here’s how to fix a Brand Registry rejection).
• Catalogue hygiene: fix broken variations and stray SKUs before they become listing violations; see our guides to generic listings and SKU problems in FBA.
• FBM: watch ODR, late dispatch and valid tracking daily during peak season.

A healthy account isn’t automatically a profitable one. If your score is fine but margins aren’t, read how to stop Amazon from killing your profits.

How Horison helps

Horison Marketing’s catalogue troubleshooting team fixes suppressed and deactivated listings, works through Account Health violations and prepares appeals with the evidence Amazon asks for. With account management, account health is monitored alongside PPC and listings, with a monthly review, for brands in the UK, EU and US. We’ve managed more than 200 brands. If a violation is on your Account Health page now, book a free discovery call and we’ll look at it with you.