When are Amazon performance reviews? (2026)
Amazon evaluates against its published Leadership Principles, in writing, with peer feedback assembled into a document rather than a conversation. The principles are the vocabulary, so your record should already be written in it.
Once a year
No specific review month is published for this company, because none could be sourced from the company's own material. What follows is the cycle shape, which is what is actually knowable. Your own manager is the authority on this year's dates.
How the cycle works
Amazon publishes its Leadership Principles, and unlike most published values they are used operationally: in interviews, in decision meetings, and in performance assessment. That publication is a gift to anyone preparing a review, because the rubric is not a secret. You can read the criteria you are being measured against and write your record in their exact language.
The culture is heavily written. Six-page narratives, written proposals, and documents read in silence at the start of a meeting are how decisions get made, which means a substantial share of your visible contribution is documents. A document that changed a direction is a citable artifact in a way a persuasive meeting performance is not.
Peer feedback feeds the assessment, and it is typically requested in terms of the principles as well: what did this person do that demonstrated ownership, or bias for action, or dived deep.
Specific cycle timing varies by organization and has changed across years. Ask your manager for the current dates.
What actually gets weighed
Ownership is the principle most visible in evaluation. It means acting beyond the boundary of your assigned scope and declining to say "not my team". Concretely: the problem you picked up because nobody else had, the escalation you resolved rather than routed.
Customer obsession is the framing that makes any contribution legible. Internal improvements land harder when restated as what a customer can now do, or no longer suffers.
Delivering results at scale is the third. This is an operation where things run at very large volume, so an improvement that works at small scale and fails at large is not an improvement. Evidence that you thought about the scaled case reads as senior judgment.
Frugality and dive deep both show up as a preference for people who know their own numbers to an uncomfortable level of detail. Being unable to answer a follow-up question about your own metric is costly here.
What to have ready
- Your record already sorted under the principles, in their published wording rather than a paraphrase.
- Every document you wrote that changed a decision, with the decision named.
- The numbers behind each claim, plus one level of detail below them, since the follow-up question is the norm.
- Problems you took ownership of that were not assigned to you.
- Customer-facing framing for everything internal.