Updated 22 Oct 2026 • 7 mins read
Azure Blob Storage Pricing (2026): Tiers, Transactions, and Egress
Azure Blob Storage pricing runs from about $0.018 per GB-month in Hot to $0.00099 in Archive, but transactions, retrieval, minimum retention, redundancy, and egress decide the real bill. This breakdown gives every rate for East US in 2026, worked terabyte examples, the July 2026 minimum-size change, and how Blob compares with S3 and GCS.
Azure Blob Storage pricing is four numbers that everyone quotes and four meters that almost no one budgets. The numbers are the tiers: about $0.018 per gigabyte-month in Hot, $0.010 in Cool, about $0.0045 in Cold, and about $0.00099 in Archive, an eighteenfold spread that makes the cheap tier look like a free decision. The meters are transactions, retrieval, minimum retention, and egress, and each one is designed so that the cheap tier is only cheap for data that behaves the way the tier expects. Read a Cold blob twice a month and it costs more than Hot. Delete an Archive blob after a month and you pay for six. Serve a Hot terabyte to the internet once and the egress is four times the storage.
This guide gives every Azure Blob rate for East US as of October 2026, explains how the four meters interact, works through what a terabyte costs in each tier and each pattern, covers the redundancy multipliers, reserved capacity, and the July 2026 minimum-size change, and compares Blob with S3 and Google Cloud Storage. Rates are from Microsoft's Blob Storage pricing page; what to do about the result is in our Azure storage cost optimization guide, and the three-cloud comparison in our cloud storage pricing guide.
The short answer: Azure Blob Storage in East US with locally redundant storage costs about $0.018 per GB-month in the Hot tier (first 50 TB), $0.010 in Cool, about $0.0045 in Cold, and about $0.00099 in Archive. The cooler tiers charge more per operation, charge per GB retrieved ($0.01 Cool, $0.03 Cold, about $0.02 plus hours of rehydration for Archive), and bill a minimum retention of 30, 90, and 180 days with an early-deletion charge for data that leaves sooner. Redundancy multiplies capacity cost, about 1.25x for zone-redundant and 2x for geo-redundant; egress is about $0.087 per GB after 100 GB a month; and from July 2026 new accounts bill a 128 KiB minimum per blob in the cooler tiers. A terabyte costs about $18.40 a month in Hot and about $1 in Archive; serving it to the internet once costs about $87. Reserved capacity saves up to 38 percent on Hot and 48 percent on Cool for 100 TiB and above.
Key Takeaways
- Four tiers spanning about 18x in capacity price, each with a minimum retention of 0, 30, 90, or 180 days billed in full on early deletion.
- Cooler tiers cost more to touch: higher transaction rates and per-GB retrieval fees that make them cheaper only for data that is rarely accessed.
- Redundancy is a multiplier on capacity, about 2x for geo-redundant; egress at $0.087 per GB exceeds storage for anything served publicly.
- From July 2026, cooler tiers bill a 128 KiB minimum per blob on new accounts, which changes the math for small-object workloads.
- Reserved capacity discounts capacity only, up to 38 percent on Hot and 48 percent on Cool, for estates above 100 TiB.
Storage Pricing by Tier
East US, locally redundant (LRS), block blobs, October 2026.
| Tier | Per GB-month | 1 TB per month | Retrieval per GB | Minimum retention | Access | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hot | About $0.018 (first 50 TB); lower above | About $18.40 | None | None | Milliseconds | Active data read and written often |
| Cool | $0.010 | $10.24 | $0.01 | 30 days | Milliseconds | Data read a few times a month |
| Cold | About $0.0045 | About $4.60 | $0.03 | 90 days | Milliseconds | Data read a few times a year, needed immediately |
| Archive | About $0.00099 | About $1.01 | About $0.02 plus rehydration | 180 days | Up to 15 hours (about 1 hour high priority) | Compliance and long-term retention |
| Premium (SSD) | About $0.15 | About $154 | None | None | Single-digit milliseconds | Latency-sensitive, high-transaction workloads |
The Four Other Meters
Transactions
Every operation bills per 10,000. In Hot, write operations (PutBlob, PutBlock, and similar) cost about $0.05 per 10,000 and reads and lists less; Cool roughly doubles the write rate, and Cold and Archive are higher still. For large objects accessed occasionally, transactions are negligible. For millions of small objects written and listed constantly, they can rival capacity, and the cooler the tier, the worse the trade.
Retrieval
Reading data back from Cool costs $0.01 per GB, from Cold $0.03, and from Archive about $0.02 plus a rehydration delay of up to 15 hours on standard priority or about an hour on high priority at a higher rate. A terabyte in Cold read once a month pays $30 in retrieval against $4.60 in storage, so a Cold tier that is read monthly costs more than Cool, and a Cool tier read weekly costs more than Hot.
Minimum retention and early deletion
Cool, Cold, and Archive bill a minimum of 30, 90, and 180 days respectively. A blob moved to Archive and deleted after 30 days is billed for the remaining 150 at the Archive rate; a blob moved to Cool and back to Hot after 10 days pays 20 days of Cool it never used. Lifecycle rules that transition too eagerly convert this from a rule into a monthly charge on every object they touch.
Egress and redundancy
Data transfer out to the internet is free for the first 100 GB a month and about $0.087 per GB after, stepping down at higher volumes; transfer between Azure regions bills separately. Redundancy multiplies the capacity rate: locally redundant is the base, zone-redundant about 1.25x, geo-redundant about 2x, and read-access geo-redundant higher. A geo-redundant Hot terabyte costs about $37 a month, not $18, and most development, test, and regenerable data does not need it.
What a Terabyte Really Costs
East US, LRS, monthly, one terabyte in each pattern.
| Pattern | Tier | Storage | Transactions and retrieval | Egress | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Application assets served to the internet 5 TB a month | Hot | $18.40 | About $5 | 5 TB at $0.087 after 100 GB free: about $426 | About $450 |
| Same assets on geo-redundant storage | Hot, GRS | About $37 | About $5 | About $426 | About $468 |
| Backups read once a quarter | Cold | $4.60 | About $10 retrieval a quarter, about $3.30 a month | None | About $8 |
| Compliance archive, never read | Archive | $1.01 | Negligible | None | About $1 |
| Logs in Hot, never read, 10 million small objects | Hot | $18.40 | About $5 in writes | None | About $23 (about $5 in Cold after lifecycle rules, more if objects are under 128 KiB) |
Two rows carry the lesson. Served data is an egress bill with a storage line attached, and the only lever is a CDN in front of it. Unread data in Hot is the commonest Azure storage waste and the easiest fix: a lifecycle rule moving it to Cold or Archive cuts the line by 75 to 95 percent, with the new caveat that millions of tiny objects gain less once the 128 KiB minimum applies.
The July 2026 Minimum Size Rule
From July 1, 2026 for new storage accounts, and July 1, 2027 for existing ones, Cool, Cold, and Archive bill each blob at a minimum of 128 KiB of capacity regardless of its actual size. A 4 KiB log file in Cold is billed as 128 KiB, which is 32 times its size, at $0.0045 per GB; ten million of them cost about $5.80 a month rather than the $0.18 their real size would suggest, and in Hot, with no minimum, the same files cost about $0.70. For small-object workloads the cooler tiers can now cost more than Hot, and lifecycle policies written before the change should be reviewed against object-size distribution.
Reserved Capacity and Regional Variation
Reserved capacity is bought in 100 TiB or 1 PiB units for one or three years on Hot, Cool, or Archive block blob storage, in a chosen region and redundancy, and discounts capacity by up to about 38 percent on Hot and 48 percent on Cool against pay-as-you-go; operations, retrieval, early deletion, and egress are not covered. It suits estates with at least 100 TiB that will not shrink. Rates above are East US; most US regions match, European regions run slightly higher, and some Asia Pacific and South America regions run 20 to 40 percent higher on capacity and considerably higher on egress.
Azure Blob vs S3 vs Google Cloud Storage
| Azure Blob (East US) | Amazon S3 (US East) | Google Cloud Storage (US) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hot / Standard per GB-month | About $0.018 | $0.023 | About $0.020 |
| First cool tier | Cool $0.010 (30-day min) | Standard-IA $0.0125 (30-day min) | Nearline $0.010 (30-day min) |
| Second cool tier | Cold about $0.0045 (90-day min) | Glacier Instant $0.004 (90-day min) | Coldline $0.004 (90-day min) |
| Archive | About $0.00099 (180-day min, hours to read) | Deep Archive $0.00099 (180-day min, hours to read) | Archive $0.0012 (365-day min, milliseconds to read) |
| Egress per GB | About $0.087 | $0.09 | $0.12 (premium tier) |
| Minimum billable size (cool tiers) | 128 KiB from July 2026 (new accounts) | 128 KB on IA and Glacier Instant | None |
| Automatic tiering | Smart tier (new) and lifecycle rules | Intelligent-Tiering ($0.0025 per 1,000 objects) | Autoclass (per-object fee) |
At the hot end the three are within 25 percent of each other, and the structural differences matter more than the headline rates: Google's Archive is instantly readable where Azure's and AWS's are not, Azure's egress is the cheapest of the three, and the minimum-size and minimum-retention rules decide whether a cool tier is actually cheaper for a given workload. The full comparison is in our cloud storage pricing guide.
How Opslyft Helps
The four meters above land on an Azure invoice as separate lines that no container or team is named on, which is why storage is managed at the subscription level and the Hot-tier data nobody reads, the geo-redundant development account, and the unattached disks go unnoticed. Opslyft shows Azure storage cost by tier, account, and owning team beside the rest of the Azure bill and flags the accounts and containers sitting in Hot with no recent access; the levers that follow are in our Azure storage cost optimization guide.
Conclusion
Azure Blob Storage pricing rewards data that behaves the way its tier expects and penalizes data that does not. The capacity rates span eighteenfold; the transaction, retrieval, minimum-retention, and egress meters decide whether the cheap tier is cheap for you. Price the pattern, not the tier: how often the data is read, how long it stays, how much leaves to the internet, and whether the objects are large enough to clear the new 128 KiB floor. Then right-size redundancy, reserve stable capacity above 100 TiB, and put public content behind a CDN. For the rest of the Azure bill, see our Azure cost management guide; for Blob against S3 and GCS, our cloud storage pricing comparison.
FAQs
In East US with locally redundant storage, about $0.018 per GB-month in the Hot tier for the first 50 TB, $0.010 in Cool, about $0.0045 in Cold, and about $0.00099 in Archive. Each cooler tier charges more per operation and per GB retrieved and carries a minimum retention of 30, 90, or 180 days. Redundancy multiplies the capacity rate: zone-redundant about 1.25x, geo-redundant about 2x.
Transactions, per 10,000 operations, with write operations costing about $0.05 per 10,000 in Hot and more in cooler tiers; data retrieval per GB on Cool ($0.01), Cold ($0.03), and Archive (about $0.02 plus rehydration time); early-deletion charges when data leaves a tier before its minimum retention; egress at about $0.087 per GB after the first 100 GB a month; and optional features such as versioning, soft delete, and index tags that consume capacity or bill per operation.
All three are for data accessed less often, at descending storage prices and ascending access costs. Cool ($0.010) is online with millisecond access, a $0.01 per GB retrieval fee, and a 30-day minimum. Cold (about $0.0045) is online with millisecond access, a $0.03 per GB retrieval fee, and a 90-day minimum. Archive (about $0.00099) is offline: reading it requires rehydration taking up to 15 hours (about an hour on high priority), with a 180-day minimum.
About $18.40 a month in Hot, $10.24 in Cool, about $4.60 in Cold, and about $1.01 in Archive, with locally redundant storage in East US, before transactions and egress. With geo-redundant storage roughly double. Serving that terabyte to the internet once costs about $87 in egress, more than four times the Hot storage rate.
From July 1, 2026 for new storage accounts, and July 1, 2027 for existing ones, Cool, Cold, and Archive bill each blob at a minimum of 128 KiB of capacity regardless of its actual size. Buckets of millions of tiny objects therefore gain less from cooler tiers than their total size suggests, and in extreme cases cost more there than in Hot.
Yes. Reserved capacity is bought in 100 TiB or 1 PiB blocks for one or three years on Hot, Cool, or Archive block blob storage and saves up to about 38 percent on Hot and 48 percent on Cool against pay-as-you-go. It covers capacity only, not operations, retrieval, early deletion, or egress.
Closely at the hot end: Azure Hot about $0.018, Google Standard $0.020, S3 Standard $0.023 per GB-month. The cooler tiers differ more in structure than price: Azure has four tiers, Google four, S3 seven. Egress is similar ($0.087 Azure, $0.09 AWS, $0.12 Google). The decisive differences are usually the minimum-retention rules and the minimum billable size, not the headline rates.