How to get paid by Amazon KDP in Nigeria

You have sold some books, Amazon says you have royalties, and now you want the money. This is the part nobody explains properly. What you hand Amazon — a Nigerian bank account or a US one — decides how you get paid, in what currency, and how long you wait for it.

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What Amazon does with a Nigerian bank account

Amazon picks the payment method by where your bank sits, not by where you live. Its payment options page carries a table of every country it pays into. Nigeria gets one row, and the row says wire transfer, currency NGN. Direct deposit and cheque are both marked N/A.

So if you give Amazon your GTBank or Access account, you are on the wire route. Naira, converted by Amazon, paid once you clear a minimum. Three African countries do get direct deposit: South Africa, Egypt and Kenya. Nigeria is not one of them.

For a bank account in Nigeria, Amazon.pl and Amazon.se show no payment method at all. Not a threshold, not a slower route. If your book sells in Poland or Sweden, Amazon has no way to send those royalties to a Nigerian bank account.

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You may have seen a Nigerian blog announce that Amazon KDP now accepts Nigerian bank accounts. It has been circulating since February 2025 and it is where most of this belief comes from. What it describes is the wire option, which Amazon has offered Nigeria all along. The post also tells readers they will not have to wait to reach $100 — and then the same author, answering a reader in the comments below it, writes: “The only downside is that you have to reach a threshold of 100$ before you get paid.” Amazon's published figure agrees with the comment, not the headline.

The $100 wall is really a $143 wall

Amazon's rule, in its own words: “Only wire and check payments must accrue a minimum amount of earned royalties through the sale of your book.” The wire minimum on Amazon.com is $100. On the UK store it is £100, on the European stores €100. Amazon publishes no naira figure at all, so if a guide quotes you one, it made it up. (Amazon's page.)

Two things make that harder than it sounds.

It is $100 per marketplace, not $100 in total. Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and the European stores each keep their own balance. Earn $60 in the US store and £45 in the UK store and you have two piles of money, and Amazon pays neither of them.

And the $100 is counted after tax, not before. Amazon takes the US withholding off first and then checks what is left against the threshold. At 30%, which is the Nigerian rate, you need roughly $143 of royalties before $100 survives to be paid to you.

An author in Morocco, on the same wire-only route as Nigeria, wrote this on Amazon's own author forum in December 2025: “Local wire transfers require reaching USD 100 in each individual Amazon marketplace before any payment is released. For many small or new authors, that threshold can take months or may never be reached at all.”

The tax interview takes 30%, and the 7.5% going round is not real

Before Amazon pays anyone it makes them sit a tax interview. One of its questions is whether your country has a tax treaty with the United States that lowers the rate on royalties.

Nigeria does not have one. The IRS publishes the list (Table 3, updated through 26 September 2025) and the only African countries on it are Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia. With no treaty to claim, the standard 30% comes off royalties from US sales.

Worth being blunt about this, because a guide for African authors published in June 2026 tells its readers that Nigeria has a treaty with the US that cuts the rate on royalties to 7.5%. It cites nothing. The IRS list says otherwise. Claiming a treaty rate you are not entitled to is a false statement on a form you sign, so answer the interview honestly and take the 30%. What you then owe, or do not owe, in Nigeria is a question for an accountant.

The US account route, and the rule Amazon changed in August

A bank account in the United States changes the method. Amazon pays those by direct deposit, in dollars, and direct deposit “usually has no minimum payment threshold” — a $12 month is a $12 payment. There is one restriction and Amazon is flat about it: “We support EFT payments to checking accounts but not to savings accounts.”

That is why Nigerian authors use dollar account apps like Daya Borders. The app hands you US account and routing numbers in your own name, you paste them into KDP, and Amazon sees a US account.

In August Amazon narrowed which of those accounts it will pay, and this is the most important paragraph on this page.

Amazon runs a Payment Service Provider Program, and its page on it says: “As of August 1, 2026, we have stopped making payments to KDP accounts that are using a PSP that is not participating in the Payment Service Provider Program, or have not completed the know-your-customer verification (KYC) with their participating PSP.”

Two kinds of account survive that, in Amazon's own phrasing: “a participating PSP or an account which you opened directly with a deposit-taking bank”. The participating list runs to 46 providers.

If your account is refused, read the error rather than guessing. Amazon publishes five of them, and each one points somewhere different: “We currently don't support this Payment Service Provider (PSP)”, “Only accounts from deposit-taking banks are allowed”, “Invalid bank details were added”, “A new routing number or bank details may be required”, and “Your bank is requesting additional verification before we can issue payments”.

The two routes side by side

Fees read off each provider's own pages on 12 October 2026. The minimum column is Amazon's, not the provider's.

Where Daya Borders fits

Daya Borders gives you account and routing details in your own name, in dollars and euros, and takes nothing from an incoming dollar payment. There is no cap on that, so a $40 month and a $4,000 month both arrive whole. You convert and withdraw to a Nigerian bank account when you want naira.

The most important part is that Daya Borders grants you a bank account that Amazon KDP will accept. In the app, you can choose between different bank options; and we point you towards the best bank to use for your use case. If you're an Amazon author, that's Cross River Bank.

Setting it up without losing a payment cycle

Do the tax interview first. Amazon will not let you add a payment method until it is finished, and an unfinished one makes the payment page behave in ways that look like a bank problem.

Create your USD bank account with Daya Borders. Sign up on Daya Borders to get a US bank account with your own details.

Check the account type and the name. A US account has to be a checking account, and the account holder name has to match your KDP account exactly. Make sure the name in your account matches the name in your KDP account.

Add the details in Getting Paid and wait for the validation. Amazon checks the name, account number and routing number within five business days, so you find out early rather than at the end of the month.

Keep your monthly royalty reports. They are the only record of what you earned and what was withheld, and you will want them the first time anyone asks where the money came from.