When does Amazon Relay pay? The weekly cycle and cutoff

Amazon Relay pays on a fixed weekly cycle. The work period runs Sunday 00:00 to Saturday 23:59; every load completed before that Saturday cutoff belongs to the week's invoice, which Amazon generates in the following days and posts to the portal. Payment then follows on the invoice's own terms.

Carriers do not submit invoices to Relay — Amazon produces them. Your job is not to bill, it is to check.

The dates, concretely

In the invoice this tool was built against, the work period ended Saturday 20 June and the invoice was dated Tuesday 23 June — a three-day gap between the period closing and the paperwork appearing.

Relay's own documentation describes payment the following week, but actual posting dates move by a day or two in practice. Treat the date and pay term on your own invoice as the authority, not any rule of thumb — including this one.

The cutoff is why loads go missing

Here is the part that causes the most confusion every single week.

A load that finishes after the Saturday cutoff lands on the next invoice. So does a load that finished before the cutoff but whose delivery confirmation was recorded late — the load was done, the paperwork was not, and the system saw it after the period closed.

Either way you get the same experience: you ran the load, you know you ran it, and it is not on the invoice. Nothing is wrong. It is early, not missing.

This is not a rare edge case. In the sample week this tool was validated against, 12 of 148 loads were completed but absent from that week's invoice — about one load in twelve, in a perfectly ordinary week.

The same thing, seen from the other side

The mirror image shows up too: invoice lines with no matching load in your trips export. These are almost always last week's rollovers arriving on this week's invoice.

If you reconcile a single week in isolation, these look like payments for work you cannot account for. They are simply the other end of the same lag. When a paid item's end date falls before the work period even started, it is a prior-week load being settled now.

Telling a rollover from a real problem

Not every unpaid completed load is a rollover, and this is the distinction worth getting right — it decides whether you wait or whether you act.

That 48-hour window is a judgement call, not a rule Amazon publishes. It exists because delivery confirmation lag is real and clusters near the end of the period. A load that finished on Wednesday and never appeared has no timing explanation, and it is the one to look at.

LoadRecon applies exactly this split automatically, labelling completed unpaid loads either likely rollover or review — payment missing against the cutoff parsed from your own invoice. It is a timing heuristic, not a verdict — confirming a rollover means seeing the load on next week's invoice.

The dispute clock is running while you wait

Here is the tension nobody mentions: payment disputes go through the Relay portal within 30 days of the invoice date, but confirming whether a load rolled over means waiting for the next invoice — a week gone from a 30-day window.

That is manageable, but only if you reconcile weekly. Check each invoice when it lands, note the loads flagged as review-worthy, and confirm the previous week's rollovers as you go. Reconcile monthly instead and a genuine non-payment on the first invoice of the month has already burned most of its window by the time you find it.

Next: how to download the invoice, or understanding the payment categories.