Updated 21 Oct 2026 • 5 mins read
Amazon S3 Pricing per GB (2026): Storage Classes, Requests, and Egress
Amazon S3 pricing per GB runs from $0.023 in Standard to $0.00099 in Glacier Deep Archive, but storage is only one of four meters: requests, retrieval fees, and data transfer out often cost more. This 2026 breakdown gives every storage class rate, the fees around them, worked examples, and how Intelligent-Tiering decides for you.
Amazon S3 pricing per GB is the most quoted number in cloud storage and the least useful one on its own. The number is $0.023, the Standard rate in US East, and it describes one of four meters. The other three, requests, retrieval fees, and data transfer out, are where S3 bills surprise people, because a terabyte that costs $23 a month to store costs $90 to serve to the internet once, and a million small files cost more to list than to keep. This guide gives every rate for every storage class, the fees around them, what a terabyte costs in each class, and the one feature that moves data between classes without a decision.
Rates are from the official S3 pricing page for US East (N. Virginia) as of October 2026 and vary by region. For what to do about the result, our S3 cost optimization guide covers the levers; for how S3 compares with Azure Blob and Google Cloud Storage, our cloud storage pricing comparison; and to price your own configuration, our S3 cost calculator.
The short answer: Amazon S3 charges four things. Storage, per GB-month by class: Standard $0.023 (first 50 TB, stepping down to $0.021 above 500 TB), Standard-IA $0.0125, One Zone-IA $0.01, Glacier Instant Retrieval $0.004, Glacier Flexible Retrieval $0.0036, Glacier Deep Archive $0.00099, and Intelligent-Tiering at the matching tier rates plus $0.0025 per 1,000 objects monitored. Requests: about $0.005 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, and LIST and $0.0004 per 1,000 GET. Retrieval: $0.01 per GB on the infrequent-access classes, $0.03 on Glacier Instant, and per-GB fees plus hours of delay on the deeper Glacier classes, with 30-, 90-, and 180-day minimum storage durations. Data transfer: free in, free to CloudFront, 100 GB a month free out, then $0.09 per GB to the internet for the first 10 TB. A terabyte costs about $23.55 a month in Standard and about $1 in Deep Archive; serving it to the internet once costs about $90.
Key Takeaways
- Storage per GB spans 23x across classes, from $0.023 in Standard to $0.00099 in Deep Archive, each cooler class trading retrieval fees and minimum durations for the lower rate.
- Requests bill per thousand and PUT and LIST cost 12 times GET; millions of small objects make requests a real line.
- Egress at $0.09 per GB is the charge that exceeds storage for anything served publicly; S3 to CloudFront is free.
- Intelligent-Tiering moves objects between tiers automatically for $0.0025 per 1,000 objects, with no retrieval fees, but never moves objects under 128 KB.
- Minimum storage durations of 30, 90, and 180 days bill in full on early deletion, so class choice is a commitment.
Storage Pricing by Class
AWS describes each class on its storage classes page; the table gives the 2026 rates for US East.
| Storage class | Per GB-month | 1 TB per month | Retrieval per GB | Minimum duration | Access time | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | $0.023 (first 50 TB); $0.022 next 450 TB; $0.021 above | $23.55 | None | None | Milliseconds | Active data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | Tier rates from $0.023 down to $0.00099, plus $0.0025 per 1,000 objects monitored | $23.55 falling as data cools | None | None | Milliseconds (archive tiers slower) | Unknown or changing access |
| S3 Standard-IA | $0.0125 | $12.80 | $0.01 | 30 days | Milliseconds | Infrequent, quick retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | $0.01 | $10.24 | $0.01 | 30 days | Milliseconds | Re-creatable infrequent data |
| S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | $0.004 | $4.10 | $0.03 | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive needing instant access |
| S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval | $0.0036 | $3.69 | Free (bulk, 5 to 12 hours) to $0.03 (expedited, minutes) | 90 days | Minutes to hours | Archive, rare access |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | $0.00099 | $1.01 | $0.02 (standard, up to 12 hours); bulk cheaper, up to 48 hours | 180 days | Hours | Compliance and long-term retention |
| S3 Express One Zone | About $0.11 to $0.16 | About $115 to $165 | None | None | Single-digit milliseconds | Latency-critical workloads |
The Three Other Meters
Requests
Every operation is a request, billed per thousand. In US East, PUT, COPY, POST, and LIST cost about $0.005 per 1,000; GET, SELECT, and other reads about $0.0004 per 1,000; and lifecycle transitions into cooler classes carry their own per-1,000 charges. For large objects accessed occasionally, requests are negligible. For millions of small objects written and listed constantly, they rival storage: a bucket receiving 100 million PUTs a month pays $500 in requests before storing a byte.
Retrieval and minimum duration
The cooler classes charge to read data back: $0.01 per GB on the infrequent-access classes, $0.03 on Glacier Instant Retrieval, and per-GB fees with waiting time on Flexible and Deep Archive, where bulk retrieval is cheap or free and expedited retrieval is not. Each cooler class also has a minimum storage duration, 30, 90, or 180 days, billed in full if an object is deleted or moved sooner. Together these mean a class is cheapest only for the access pattern it was built for; data read twice a month costs more in Standard-IA than in Standard.
Data transfer
Transfer into S3 is free. Transfer out to the internet is free for the first 100 GB a month across all AWS services, then $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB, $0.085 for the next 40 TB, $0.07 for the next 100 TB, and $0.05 above 150 TB. Transfer from S3 to CloudFront is free, and CloudFront's own egress is cheaper with a 1 TB free tier, which is why public content belongs behind it. Transfer between AWS regions is about $0.02 per GB, and reading S3 from a private subnet through a NAT Gateway adds $0.045 per GB that a free gateway endpoint avoids. The full map is in our AWS data transfer fees guide.
What a Terabyte Really Costs
Three workloads, one terabyte, US East, monthly.
| Workload | Storage | Requests | Retrieval | Egress | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Application assets in Standard, 1 TB served to the internet 5 times over | $23.55 | About $5 | None | 5 TB at $0.09 (after 100 GB free): about $441 | About $470 |
| Same assets served through CloudFront | $23.55 | About $5 | None | S3 to CloudFront free; CloudFront egress 5 TB at $0.085 after 1 TB free: about $340 | About $369 |
| Backups in Glacier Deep Archive, restored once a year | $1.01 | Negligible | $20 once a year, about $1.70 a month | None | About $3 |
| Logs in Standard, 1 TB, never read, 10 million small objects | $23.55 | About $50 in PUTs | None | None | About $74 (and $4 in Glacier Instant with a lifecycle rule) |
Intelligent-Tiering: Pricing That Decides for You
S3 Intelligent-Tiering is a class that moves each object between tiers based on its own access history: objects accessed recently are billed at the Standard rate, objects untouched for 30 days move to a tier priced like Standard-IA, and after 90 days to one priced like Glacier Instant Retrieval, with optional Archive Access and Deep Archive Access tiers for data untouched longer. There are no retrieval fees and no minimum durations; the cost is a monitoring fee of $0.0025 per 1,000 objects a month. It suits data with unpredictable access and removes the lifecycle-rule decision. Its one trap is small files: objects under 128 KB stay in the frequent tier at Standard rates while still incurring the monitoring fee, so a bucket of millions of tiny objects pays to be monitored and never benefits.
Free Tier and Regional Variation
Legacy free-tier accounts receive 5 GB of Standard storage, 20,000 GET and 2,000 PUT requests a month for 12 months; accounts created since July 2025 receive credits instead. The 100 GB of monthly internet egress is always free on every account. Rates above are US East; most US regions match, European regions run a few percent higher, and some regions, notably South America and parts of Asia Pacific, run 20 to 40 percent higher on storage and considerably higher on egress.
How Opslyft Helps
The four meters above land on an AWS bill as separate lines that no bucket is named on, which is why S3 cost is usually managed at the account level and rarely at the bucket, team, or product level where the decisions are made. Opslyft shows S3 storage, request, retrieval, and transfer cost by bucket, class, and owning team beside the rest of the bill, and flags the buckets sitting in Standard with no recent access; the levers that follow are in our S3 cost optimization guide.
The Bottom Line
Amazon S3 pricing per GB is $0.023 in Standard and far less in the classes built for colder data, and the gigabyte rate is the least important number on an S3 bill. Requests matter for small-object workloads, retrieval fees and minimum durations make class choice a commitment, and egress at $0.09 per GB turns anything served publicly into a transfer bill with a storage line attached. Price all four meters for your access pattern, put public content behind CloudFront, let lifecycle rules or Intelligent-Tiering move cold data down the classes, and read S3 from inside AWS through endpoints rather than NAT. Then the gigabyte rate is what you actually pay. For the comparison with Azure and Google, see our cloud storage pricing guide.
FAQs
In US East, S3 Standard costs $0.023 per GB-month for the first 50 TB, $0.022 for the next 450 TB, and $0.021 above 500 TB. Cheaper classes for less-frequently accessed data run from $0.0125 (Standard-IA) and $0.01 (One Zone-IA) down to $0.004 (Glacier Instant Retrieval), $0.0036 (Glacier Flexible Retrieval), and $0.00099 (Glacier Deep Archive), with minimum storage durations and retrieval fees on the cooler classes. Requests and data transfer out are billed separately.
Requests, at about $0.005 per 1,000 for PUT, COPY, POST, and LIST and $0.0004 per 1,000 for GET and SELECT; data transfer out to the internet at $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB after a 100 GB monthly free allowance (free to CloudFront); retrieval fees on infrequent-access and Glacier classes; and features such as replication, Storage Lens advanced metrics, and Intelligent-Tiering's monitoring fee of $0.0025 per 1,000 objects.
Glacier Deep Archive at $0.00099 per GB-month, about $1 per terabyte, with a 180-day minimum storage duration and retrieval times of up to 12 hours (standard) or 48 hours (bulk). It suits compliance archives and long-term backups. For data that must be available immediately, Glacier Instant Retrieval at $0.004 is the cheapest class with millisecond access.
Intelligent-Tiering charges the Standard rate for objects accessed recently, moves objects untouched for 30 days to a tier priced like Standard-IA and after 90 days to one priced like Glacier Instant Retrieval, with optional deeper archive tiers, and charges no retrieval fees. The cost is a monitoring fee of $0.0025 per 1,000 objects a month, and objects under 128 KB are never moved out of the frequent tier.
About $23.55 a month in S3 Standard, $12.80 in Standard-IA, $4.10 in Glacier Instant Retrieval, and about $1.01 in Glacier Deep Archive, before requests and transfer. Serving that terabyte to the internet once costs about $90 in egress, roughly four times the cost of storing it in Standard.
Transfer into S3 is free. Transfer out to the internet is free for the first 100 GB a month across all AWS services, then $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB, stepping down to $0.05 per GB above 150 TB. Transfer from S3 to CloudFront is free, which is why public content should be served through a CDN, and transfer between regions costs about $0.02 per GB.
Multiply stored gigabytes by the class rate, add requests at the PUT and GET rates for your access pattern, add egress for whatever leaves to the internet or another region, and add retrieval fees if data sits in an infrequent-access or Glacier class. For most workloads storage is the largest line, but for publicly served content egress exceeds it. The AWS pricing calculator and Opslyft's S3 cost calculator both price a configuration this way.