Kindle Unlimited page rates

Kindle Unlimited does not pay you per copy. It pays you per page read — and the amount changes every month.

We publish the full history on a free page: Kindle Unlimited page rates.

Start here: what Kindle Unlimited is

Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's reading subscription. Readers pay a monthly fee and borrow as many enrolled books as they like, at no extra cost per book.

Because the reader pays nothing for your book specifically, there is no sale and no royalty percentage. Instead:

1. Every month Amazon sets aside a pot of money — the KDP Select Global Fund.
2. Everyone's pages read that month are added up.
3. The pot is divided by the pages. That gives the rate per page.
4. You get that rate × your own pages read.

You are enrolled in this only if your ebook is in KDP Select (exclusive to Amazon). Paperbacks and hardcovers are never part of it.

What a "page read" actually means

Not a page of your paperback, and not a screen on somebody's phone. Amazon converts every book to a standard measure called KENP — Kindle Edition Normalized Pages — so that a large-print book cannot earn more than a normal one for the same text.

Two things surprise most authors:

• You are paid for pages read, not for borrows. A reader who borrows your book and stops on page 3 earns you three pages.
• Each page counts once. Re-reading the same page does not pay twice.

Your book's KENP count is on your KDP Bookshelf. It is usually somewhat higher than your paperback page count.

Why the rate changes every month

The fund is shared out among everyone's pages. So the rate goes down when readers read more than the fund grew, and up when the fund grows faster than reading does.

Neither is something you can influence, and neither says anything about the quality of your books. A month where your KU income fell while your pages read stayed flat is usually just the rate.

In practice the US rate has moved between roughly $0.0040 and $0.0050 per page for several years — about 25% between a good month and a bad one.

What Amazon publishes, and what it does not

Once a month, Amazon announces one figure: the total size of the fund, worldwide. It posts it on the KDP Community forum, around the 15th of the following month — you can read every announcement yourself:

KDP Select Global Fund announcements

That is all. Amazon has never published:

• the rate per page,
• how the fund is split between stores,
• any figure for a single marketplace.

So every KENP rate you have ever seen quoted — anywhere, including here — is worked out, not published.

How it is worked out

It is a division you can do yourself, on your own KDP dashboard:

rate = Kindle Unlimited royalties ÷ KENP pages read

Do it for one marketplace, for one month, and you have that marketplace's rate. The larger the account you do it on, the more precise the answer, because KDP rounds royalties to the cent.

If you have a TrueRoyalties account you do not have to: your KENP page runs the same division on your own numbers, per store, so you can hold your rate against the published one directly.

Each store pays in its own currency

Amazon pays a page read on amazon.de in euros, and one on amazon.co.jp in yen. A rate only means something next to its currency.

The rate page also lets you read the figure per 1,000 or 10,000 pages instead of per single page. Nothing changes but the scale: a rate of $0.00470 is $4.70 per 1,000 pages read, which is usually easier to plan against.

On the rate page you can switch the display currency. We always store the figure in the store's own currency and convert only for display, at the exchange rate from the end of the month shown — so the same month always converts to the same number, however long after the fact you look.

The Global Fund is the exception to "each store its own currency": Amazon announces one worldwide amount, in dollars. The page shows it in whichever currency you pick, converted the same way, and says so when it is not USD.

When a month becomes final

Amazon announces the fund for a month around the 15th of the following month — "around", not on a fixed date, so it sometimes lands a few days either side. Before that, nobody knows the rate: every figure published anywhere is an estimate.

The rate page picks a new month up on its own, within a week of it appearing. Nobody types these numbers in, and there is no month where the page waits for someone to update it.

On the rate page, those months are marked EST in the column header, so you can tell them apart at a glance.

Where our figures come from

Today they come from the public record kept by author-run trackers, cross-checked against a second, independent series wherever one exists.

We are replacing them with the same calculation run across TrueRoyalties accounts. A marketplace only switches over once enough accounts contribute to it that no single author's royalties could be worked back out of the published figure. Every figure on the page says which of the two it is.

What this means for your own numbers

Your KENP royalties in TrueRoyalties are not estimated from these rates — they are the actual amounts KDP reported for your account. The rate page is a reference for context and planning, not an input to your dashboard.

It does explain one thing you will notice: your most recent month can move slightly after you first see it. KDP reports Kindle Unlimited royalties as an estimate until the rate is settled, then finalizes them, and TrueRoyalties re-reads those months for you.