AWS data transfer & egress pricing
AWS egress pricing is scattered across EC2, S3, CloudFront, Direct Connect, and a dozen other service pages. This is the consolidated reference: every tier, every service, every hidden surcharge, with a calculator that respects all of it.
Headline rate: $0.09/GB first 10 TB, after the 100 GB free tier. Source →
How much does AWS egress cost?
AWS charges $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB of internet egress each month after a 100 GB free allowance, then $0.085/GB for the next 40 TB, $0.07/GB for the next 100 TB, and $0.05/GB above 150 TB. So 1 TB/month costs $83.16, 10 TB costs $912.60, and 50 TB costs $4,394.70 in base egress, before hidden surcharges like NAT Gateway and cross-AZ transfer.
AWS calls this line item data transfer out to the internet. The terms AWS bandwidth cost, data transfer pricing, and egress fees all refer to the same tiered $0.09/GB charge, there is no separate bandwidth meter.
Open the AWS egress cost calculator → to model your own volume with the full tier breakdown, or jump to the inline tool ↓. Just want the rate table? See AWS data transfer out to internet pricing →.
US regions · standard egress · excludes surcharges
AWS internet egress tiers
USD per GB · standard regionsinternet egress, post-free-tier
10-50 TB band
50-150 TB band
high-volume
[01]AWS egress cost calculator
Enter monthly volume to see the tier breakdown. Every GB is charged at the rate of the tier it falls into.
Worked examples at common DevOps volumes
First 10 TB tier. After 100 GB free, 924 GB at $0.09 = $83.16; first 100 GB free contributes $0.
Entire 10 TB at $0.09/GB minus the 100 GB free allowance (10,140 GB billable). The single-tier sweet spot.
10 TB at $0.09 + the rest at $0.085 (less the 100 GB free) — second tier kicks in at 10 TB cumulative.
10 + 40 + 100 across three tiers (less the 100 GB free). Third tier (50-150 TB) charges $0.07/GB.
All figures use standard internet egress rates from US regions, exclude CloudFront and VPC peering, and assume a single AWS account aggregating volume across the month.
Lambda-heavy scenario
Lambda response payloads count as standard internet egress. 100M invocations/mo at 4 KB avg response = 400 GB/mo egress. Cost: about \$27/mo. Most teams underestimate this.
CDN-offload scenario
Putting CloudFront in front of S3 cuts S3-to-internet egress to \$0 (free to CloudFront). CloudFront then charges \$0.085/GB first 10 TB — a saving of \$0.005/GB plus the architectural benefits.
Cross-AZ replication scenario
RDS Multi-AZ, EKS pod-to-pod, ElastiCache cross-AZ all charge \$0.01/GB each way (\$0.02/GB round trip). A chatty microservice fabric can quietly run \$1,000+/mo in cross-AZ traffic at moderate scale.
[02]Per-service egress rates
Most AWS services share the standard internet egress tiers, but the gotchas vary. Here is the cheat sheet.
| # | Service | Egress rate | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | EC2 | Tiered ($0.09/GB start) | Standard internet egress. NAT Gateway adds $0.045/GB if used. |
| 02 | S3 | Tiered ($0.09/GB start) | Same internet pricing. S3 to CloudFront in same account is free. |
| 03 | CloudFront | $0.085/GB N. America | Edge-cached. Cheaper than direct S3/EC2 at scale. |
| 04 | RDS | Tiered ($0.09/GB start) | Same as EC2. Cross-AZ replication adds $0.01/GB each way. |
| 05 | Lambda | Tiered ($0.09/GB start) | Counts toward standard internet egress tiers. |
| 06 | API Gateway | $0.09/GB on top of req fees | Separately billed from base egress, easy to miss. |
| 07 | Direct Connect | $0.02/GB egress | Plus port-hour charges. Cheaper above ~3 TB/mo on a 1 Gbps port. |
| 08 | VPN Gateway | $0.05/hr + egress | Adds up; consider Direct Connect at scale. |
At sustained volume, a dedicated link cuts egress to $0.02/GB. See the AWS Direct Connect pricing and breakeven math → (port-hour fees, $0.02/GB DTO, and the volume where DX beats internet egress).
[03]AWS CloudFront data transfer out pricing (2026)
Serving through CloudFront instead of direct S3/EC2 egress changes the per-GB rate and the free allowance. CloudFront data transfer out costs $0.085/GB for the first 10 TB per month in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe, after a 1 TB always-free tier (versus only 100 GB free on direct egress). It drops to $0.080 next 40 TB, $0.060 next 100 TB, $0.040 next 350 TB, and as low as $0.020/GB above 5 PB. CloudFront prices by edge location, so Asia, India, South America, and Africa cost more per GB.
after 1 TB free
10-50 TB band
50-150 TB band
to 500 TB, then lower
US & Europe edge rates · first 1 TB + 10M requests free each month. See the full per-region table, request fees, and price classes on the CloudFront pricing reference →, or the CloudFront vs S3 breakeven →. Source →
[04]Hidden AWS surcharges to add on
Headline egress rates are only part of the story. Most AWS workloads pay 50-200% more than the headline because of these. See the hidden costs page for full detail. Inbound data transfer is the cheap direction: AWS ingress is free, with four processing-fee exceptions.
NAT Gateway processing
$0.045/GBNAT Gateway hourly
$0.045/hrCross-AZ each way
$0.01/GBALB / NLB processing
$0.008/GBInterface VPC endpoints
$0.01/GB + $0.01/hr/AZPublic IPv4 address
$0.005/hr each[05]Worked example, 50 TB / month SaaS
A SaaS app serving 50 TB / month from us-east-1 with multi-AZ EC2 + RDS, NAT Gateway egress, and an ALB. The headline egress is $4,400. The actual bill is closer to $7,000.
Versus headline egress of $4,403, a 71% gap caused by hidden surcharges.
How does AWS compare?
Azure undercuts AWS at every tier. GCP is more expensive at headline; its Standard Tier is the cheaper option. Cloudflare R2 is zero. Compare like-for-like volumes across all of them.
[06]Frequently asked
Q.01How much does AWS charge for egress?
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AWS charges $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB of internet egress per month, $0.085 per GB for the next 40 TB, $0.07 per GB for the next 100 TB, and $0.05 per GB above 150 TB. The first 100 GB per month is free across all regions and services. Additional charges apply for cross-AZ transfer ($0.01/GB each way), cross-region transfer ($0.01-0.02/GB), and NAT Gateway processing ($0.045/GB).
Q.02Is AWS bandwidth pricing the same as egress cost?
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Yes. AWS does not have a separate bandwidth meter. What people call AWS bandwidth cost, data transfer pricing, and egress fees are all the same line item: data transfer out to the internet, billed at $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB per month after a 100 GB free allowance, then $0.085 per GB to 50 TB, $0.07 per GB to 150 TB, and $0.05 per GB above that. The only true bandwidth-style charges are capacity fees on dedicated links such as Direct Connect port-hours and VPN Gateway hourly rates, which are separate from the per-GB transfer cost. Inbound data transfer (ingress) to AWS is free.
Q.03How much is AWS CloudFront data transfer out per GB in 2026?
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CloudFront data transfer out to the internet costs $0.085 per GB for the first 10 TB per month in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe, after a 1 TB always-free allowance. It then drops to $0.080 per GB for the next 40 TB, $0.060 for the next 100 TB, $0.040 for the next 350 TB, $0.030 to 1 PB, $0.025 to 5 PB, and $0.020 above 5 PB. CloudFront prices by edge location, so Asia ($0.120/GB), India ($0.109/GB), South America ($0.110/GB), and Africa ($0.140/GB) cost more in their entry tier. Verified from aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing on 2026-06-26.
Q.04Is S3 to CloudFront egress free?
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Yes. AWS does not charge for data transfer from S3 to CloudFront when the CloudFront distribution and S3 bucket are in the same AWS account. This is a deliberate incentive to use CloudFront for content delivery. CloudFront then has its own outbound pricing tiers (slightly cheaper than direct S3 egress at scale), so combining S3 + CloudFront is the standard pattern for cost-optimised content distribution.
Q.05What is AWS cross-region transfer cost?
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AWS cross-region data transfer typically costs $0.02 per GB, dropping to $0.01-0.015 per GB on certain corridors (intra-continent transfer is cheaper than inter-continent). The exact rate depends on source and destination region. For example, us-east-1 to us-west-2 is $0.02/GB. This is in addition to internet egress, not instead of it. Cross-region replication for DR doubles your data transfer bill.
Q.06What is the AWS free tier for data transfer?
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AWS provides 100 GB per month of free outbound data transfer to the internet, aggregated across all regions and services (S3, EC2, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway, etc.). This is always-free and not part of the 12-month introductory free tier. CloudFront has its own, larger always-free tier of 1 TB per month of data transfer out plus 10 million HTTP/HTTPS requests, also permanent rather than 12-month, since the December 2021 free-tier expansion.
Q.07Does AWS charge for traffic between EC2 instances in the same AZ?
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Traffic between EC2 instances in the same AZ using private IP addresses is free. However, traffic between AZs costs $0.01/GB in each direction ($0.02/GB round trip). Public IP traffic, even within the same AZ, also incurs charges. Most production architectures use multiple AZs for high availability, so cross-AZ charges typically apply to a significant portion of internal traffic.
Q.08Does AWS waive egress fees for migration?
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Since 2024, AWS provides free outbound data transfer for customers leaving AWS to a different cloud or on-premises, under specific conditions tied to the EU Data Act. The waiver requires advance notice, the data must be transferred within a specified window, and is intended for full-account migrations rather than ongoing cross-cloud architectures. Read the announcement carefully, the conditions are narrower than the headlines suggest.