KENP Royalty Calculator
Kindle Unlimited / KDP Select earnings. Drag the sliders to model pages-read and the monthly KENP rate.
Inputs
From KDP Reports → Royalty Report → KENPC Pages Read.
Recent US fund: $0.0040 – $0.0050.
Monthly KENP royalty
50,000 pages × $0.0045/page
/month
Disclaimer: Estimates use Amazon KDP's published rates. Final amounts vary by marketplace, promotions and Amazon policy changes — always verify against your KDP dashboard.
How Kindle Unlimited actually pays
A Kindle Unlimited borrow earns you nothing by itself. You are paid for pages the reader actually reads, out of a monthly pot Amazon calls the KDP Select Global Fund:
KU earnings = KENP pages read × that month’s KENP rate
Amazon divides the fund by all pages read across all enrolled books, so the rate is not announced in advance — it is whatever the division produces. It has recently run in the region of $0.0040 to $0.0050 per page in the US fund. Amazon publishes the previous month’s figure on your KDP dashboard, which is the only number you should ever plug in.
KENP pages are not your book’s pages
KENP stands for Kindle Edition Normalized Pages, and normalising is the whole point: Amazon re-measures your book on a standard layout so that font size, device and formatting cannot inflate the count. A reader on a phone at huge type does not earn you more than a reader on a tablet.
In practice KENP usually runs higher than your print page count — a 200-page paperback often measures somewhere around 250 to 350 KENP — but the ratio is not fixed and you cannot derive it. Your KDP dashboard shows the KENP count for each title; use that, not your manuscript.
Do not pad. Amazon normalises exactly to defeat padding, and stuffing a book with filler raises your read-through dropout, which costs you more than the pages gain.
What the numbers look like
| Pages read in a month | At $0.0040 | At $0.0045 | At $0.0050 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $40.00 | $45.00 | $50.00 |
| 50,000 | $200.00 | $225.00 | $250.00 |
| 100,000 | $400.00 | $450.00 | $500.00 |
| 500,000 | $2,000.00 | $2,250.00 | $2,500.00 |
| 1,000,000 | $4,000.00 | $4,500.00 | $5,000.00 |
The spread between the low and high rate is 25%. On 500,000 pages a month that is $500 of difference you do not control, which is why you should plan against the low end and treat a good month as a good month.
Is a borrow worth more or less than a sale?
Compare like with like. Take a book that measures 400 KENP:
- Read to the end in KU at $0.0045 — 400 × 0.0045 = $1.80.
- Sold at $2.99 on the 70% lane — about $1.99.
- Sold at $4.99 — about $3.39.
So a full read-through of a short book is roughly a $2.99 sale, and any book priced above about $3.50 earns more from a sale than from a complete borrow. But that comparison assumes the reader finishes. At 50% read-through the same book earns 90 cents, and KU readers borrow far more freely than buyers buy — which is exactly the trade KDP Select asks you to make.
What enrolment costs you
KENP earnings require KDP Select, which means 90 days of Kindle exclusivity for the digital edition. No Kobo, no Apple Books, no Google Play, no selling the ePub from your own site. Paperback and audiobook are unaffected — only the eBook is locked.
The honest rule of thumb: long fiction in a series, read compulsively, usually wins in KU. Non-fiction that people consult rather than read cover to cover usually does not, because half a book read is half a book paid. Reference and puzzle books are the weakest fit of all — nobody reads a sudoku book linearly.
Other funds, other rates
The UK, German, Japanese and Indian funds pay their own rates in their own currencies, and they are not conversions of the US number. If a meaningful share of your reads come from outside the US, run the calculator once per market with that fund’s published rate rather than applying the US figure to everything.
One last thing worth knowing: KU earnings and sales royalties are paid together but reported separately in KDP. If your payout looks larger than your sales report, the difference is almost always pages read.
