us-east-1 (N. Virginia) egress pricing
us-east-1 is the cheapest AWS region for almost every service, including data transfer. It is the default region in most SDKs and the launch region for new AWS features. Internet egress is the standard $0.09/GB first-tier rate, with cross-AZ and NAT charges applying as usual.
us-east-1 rate card
| Charge | Rate | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Internet egress (first 10 TB) | $0.09/GB | Standard tiered rate, applies to EC2 / S3 / Lambda / RDS / API Gateway. |
| Internet egress (10-50 TB) | $0.085/GB | Next tier. |
| Internet egress (50-150 TB) | $0.07/GB | Next tier. |
| Internet egress (over 150 TB) | $0.05/GB | High volume. |
| Cross-AZ (each way) | $0.01/GB | Charged on both source AND destination side; effectively $0.02/GB round trip. |
| us-east-1 to us-west-2 cross-region | $0.02/GB | Inter-region within US. |
| us-east-1 to eu-west-1 cross-region | $0.02/GB | Transatlantic. |
| us-east-1 to ap-southeast-1 cross-region | $0.02/GB | Transpacific to Singapore. |
| NAT Gateway processing | $0.045/GB | Adds to egress on top, often the biggest hidden cost. |
| NAT Gateway hourly | $0.045/hr | ~$33/month per gateway. Multi-AZ deployments need 3. |
| VPC endpoint (Interface) | $0.01/GB + $0.01/hr/AZ | Use Gateway endpoints (S3, DynamoDB) where possible, those are free. |
| ALB data processing | $0.008/GB | Charged on traffic flowing through the load balancer. |
| Public IPv4 | $0.005/hr each | $43.80/year per IP. Use IPv6 to avoid where possible. |
| CloudFront origin pull from S3 (same account) | Free | S3 to CloudFront in the same AWS account incurs no transfer charge. |
Why us-east-1 is the default cost benchmark
us-east-1 was the first AWS region (launched 2006) and remains the lowest-cost region for compute, storage, and data transfer. Every other region prices at or above us-east-1 rates. When a service launches in preview, it almost always launches in us-east-1 first, then expands. If you do not have a regulatory or latency reason to be elsewhere, us-east-1 is the cost-default.
Trade-offs: us-east-1 has historically had the highest rate of regional incidents (June 2023 Lambda outage, December 2021 multi-service outage). For mission-critical workloads, many architects deploy primary in us-east-2 (Ohio, similar pricing, fewer incidents) and DR replica in us-east-1 to retain the cost benefit while reducing blast radius.
See also: eu-west-1 (Ireland), ap-southeast-1 (Singapore), Direct Connect math.