Affiliate validation periods by network

Every affiliate network gives an advertiser a window in which a tracked sale can still be declined, corrected or reduced. Every network calls that window something different, counts it differently, and ends it the same way: whatever you did not review is approved and invoiced. Awin's help centre is blunt about it — "If a commission isn't reviewed before the period ends, it will be automatically approved in line with your program's auto-validation settings."¹

This page is the table. One row per network, each number read from that network's own documentation on 18 September 2026, with a note under it saying how solid the row is. If you run two or three networks, the differences between these rows are your validation calendar.

Validation periods by network

Two things this table is not. It is not your contract: a default is what applies when nobody sets anything, and the number that governs your programme is the one in your own terms. And it is not a payment date — the period ends when the commission becomes payable, not when the money leaves.

How solid each row is

Written plainly, because a validation calendar built on a guess is worse than no calendar.

• Awin, CJ, impact.com and Webgains are from the advertiser-side source. Awin's auto-validation article, CJ's correction and extension data docs, impact's locking-period help pages, and the Webgains General Terms and Conditions for Advertisers dated August 2026.
• Rakuten's 90 days comes from the publisher help centre, not an advertiser page. No public advertiser help centre was reachable when this was checked. The number is Rakuten's own and it is stated as both the default and the maximum, but it describes the window from the publisher's side of the same transaction.
• Tradedoubler's numbers are from public pricing pages for the self-serve Grow plans. On a standard contract the period is whatever the Service Order says, and the terms page text was truncated where it describes what happens at expiry, so we do not quote that part.
• Partnerize publishes nothing. Its brand API has a campaign field called force_approve_period, which says a period exists but not what yours is.⁹ Take it from your agreement.
• ShareASale has no row. It closed in October 2025 and its programmes moved to Awin, so the Awin row applies.

CJ counts to a date, not from one

Every other network on this page counts days forward from the transaction. CJ counts to a calendar date: corrections for the previous calendar month go in before the 10th of the current month.³ A sale on 2 January and a sale on 30 January share one deadline, 10 February, and the January sale had 39 days while the one at the end of the month had 11.

The same 10th governs extensions, which buy a transaction another cycle when you cannot judge it yet — and only transactions still in NEW or ACCEPTED can be extended.⁴ After a transaction is Locked or Closed, CJ will not process a cancellation at all.³

If your CJ programme is on a custom lifecycle, ignore the 10th: it locks a fixed number of days after the event instead.⁴

What happens when it runs out

The wording differs; the outcome does not.

• Awin: anything still pending is approved in line with your auto-validation settings.¹ On Awin Access, approved commissions cannot be reversed by the advertiser.
• CJ: the transaction locks. "Cancellations cannot be processed for orders that are already in a Locked or Closed status."³
• impact.com: "You cannot modify or reverse actions after they lock."⁵ A late batch row comes back as ALREADY_LOCKED.
• Webgains: after the Validation Period expires without any action by you, transactions "are deemed as final and validated and cannot be cancelled/adjusted by You any longer".⁷
• Rakuten: the transaction update window closes and the transaction can no longer be cancelled.⁶

After that point the only routes left are a conversation with the network or a make-good arranged with the publisher. Neither is a process you want in your month-end.

Choosing your own period

Where you get to choose — Awin, Webgains, Tradedoubler, impact.com, and Rakuten through TrueLock — the arithmetic is the same one Awin recommends: your returns window plus about a week.²

The week is not padding. It covers the gap between a customer posting a parcel back and your team refunding it in Shopify, which is where most "we declined it and the refund landed the next day" stories come from. Work it out in this order:

1. Your published returns window. 30 days, 60, 100 — whatever your policy page says, not what most customers do.
2. Plus your refund lag. From the day a return arrives to the day the refund is recorded in Shopify. Look at last quarter, not at the target.
3. Plus a buffer for the cycle you actually work to. If you validate monthly, the last sale in a month waits up to four weeks for its review.
4. Capped by the network's maximum. 67 days on Awin Access and 50 on Webgains are hard ceilings; you cannot buy more time by asking.

A period shorter than your returns window is a standing decision to pay commission on returns that have not happened yet. A period at the maximum has its own cost: publishers wait longer to be paid, and a programme with a reputation for slow validation is a harder programme to recruit into. Say which trade you are making, in your programme terms, and keep it the same every cycle.

How AffCheck dates a pending transaction

AffCheck stamps an auto-approval date on every pending row it imports, and the date is worked out one of two ways, because a day count cannot express CJ:

• A day count. Transaction date plus N calendar days, in UTC. Awin's own example holds exactly: 30 days on a transaction tracked 1 September is 1 October.²
• CJ's 10th. The 10th of the month after the transaction's month, which crosses year ends on its own — a 27 December transaction is due 10 January.

It starts each network on the default in the table above — Awin 30 days, CJ the 10th, Rakuten 90, Webgains 35 — and shows the date that number was read next to the setting. Where a network publishes no default, the rows stay undated. impact.com, Partnerize and Tradedoubler have no single published number, so AffCheck leaves those deadlines blank until you enter the period from your own agreement rather than inventing one. Change a network's rule or its number and every pending row on that network is re-dated in the same request.

The dates are the network's UTC calendar day, because that is the day the network acts on; your store's timezone only decides what counts as today, and where your local calendar reads differently the screen says so. Deadlines and validation periods in the help centre has the screen-by-screen version.

Per-network guides

• Awin: the auto-validation period, explained, and how to decline Awin commissions for returns.
• CJ Affiliate: commission corrections for returns, including the 10th and the custom lifecycle.
• impact.com: reversing actions before they lock.
• Every network: what to write in the reason field, and what to do when two networks claim one order.
• The season these dates matter most: the holiday returns validation checklist, with each network's deadline for a Black Friday sale.