AWS S3 pricing in 2026: complete breakdown
Amazon S3 has been the default object storage for almost two decades, but its pricing model is also one of the most complex in cloud computing. Storage costs are only one line on your bill. Requests, retrievals and egress often surprise teams who based their forecasts on the per-GB headline rate alone.
This guide breaks down every line item that affects your S3 bill in 2026, with exact prices pulled from the official AWS pricing data published on 2026-05-12 for the US East (N. Virginia) region.
Storage class pricing in 2026
S3 splits storage into classes optimized for different access patterns. The price per GB drops as you accept slower retrieval or fewer redundancy guarantees.
| Storage class | Price (per GB / month) | Min. duration | Min. object size |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard (first 50 TB) | $0.023 | None | None |
| S3 Standard (next 450 TB) | $0.022 | None | None |
| S3 Standard (over 500 TB) | $0.021 | None | None |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering (Frequent) | $0.023 | None | None |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering (Infrequent) | $0.0125 | None | None |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering (Archive Instant) | $0.004 | None | None |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering (Archive Access) | $0.0036 | None | None |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering (Deep Archive Access) | $0.00099 | None | None |
| S3 Standard-IA | $0.0125 | 30 days | 128 KB |
| S3 One Zone-IA | $0.01 | 30 days | 128 KB |
| S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | $0.004 | 90 days | 128 KB |
| S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval | $0.0036 | 90 days | 40 KB metadata |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | $0.00099 | 180 days | 40 KB metadata |
| S3 Express One Zone | $0.11 | None | None |
A few things worth highlighting:
- S3 Standard is the default but rarely the cheapest. If your data is accessed less than once a month, Standard-IA cuts storage cost by 46%. If access is rare, Glacier classes drop costs by 80-95%.
- Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between tiers based on access patterns. There is no retrieval fee, but there is a monitoring fee of $0.0025 per 1,000 objects monitored.
- Express One Zone is the outlier at $0.11/GB, almost 5x the cost of Standard. It is designed for single-digit millisecond latency and 50% cheaper requests, not for general-purpose storage.
- Minimum storage durations matter. If you delete an object from Glacier Deep Archive after 30 days, AWS still bills you for the full 180-day minimum.
Request pricing
Every PUT, GET, COPY, LIST and DELETE counts. Per-request charges vary dramatically across storage classes.
| Storage class | PUT/COPY/POST/LIST (per 1,000) | GET/SELECT (per 1,000) |
|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | $0.005 | $0.0004 |
| S3 Standard-IA | $0.01 | $0.001 |
| S3 One Zone-IA | $0.01 | $0.001 |
| S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | $0.02 | $0.01 |
| S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval | $0.03 | $0.0004 (Tier 2) |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | $0.05 | $0.0004 (Tier 2) |
| S3 Express One Zone | $0.00113 | $0.00003 |
Two patterns to notice:
- Cheaper storage classes have more expensive requests. Glacier Deep Archive saves you 95% on storage but charges 10x more for PUTs. For workloads with millions of small objects, the request cost can outweigh storage savings.
- Express One Zone has the cheapest requests in the entire S3 family, 78% lower than Standard. This makes it attractive for high-throughput workloads with many small operations, even though storage is more expensive.
Retrieval fees
Standard-IA, One Zone-IA and the Glacier classes charge per-GB retrieval fees on top of the request cost.
| Storage class | Retrieval fee |
|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None |
| S3 Standard-IA | $0.01 / GB |
| S3 One Zone-IA | $0.01 / GB |
| S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | $0.03 / GB |
| S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (Bulk) | Free |
| S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (Standard) | $0.01 / GB |
| S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (Expedited) | $0.03 / GB |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive (Standard) | $0.02 / GB |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive (Bulk) | $0.0025 / GB |
| S3 Express One Zone | $0.0006 / GB |
For Glacier Flexible Retrieval, you choose the retrieval mode at request time: Bulk (5-12 hours, free), Standard (3-5 hours, $0.01/GB) or Expedited (1-5 minutes, $0.03/GB). Deep Archive only offers Standard (within 12 hours) and Bulk (within 48 hours).
Data transfer out (egress): the bill killer
Egress is where AWS S3 makes most of its margin and where most teams get a nasty surprise. Data transferred out of S3 to the internet is billed in tiered rates:
| Volume per month | Price per GB |
|---|---|
| First 100 GB | Free (aggregated across all AWS services) |
| Next 9.999 TB | $0.09 |
| Next 40 TB | $0.085 |
| Next 100 TB | $0.07 |
| Over 150 TB | $0.05 |
Data transfer in is free. Transfer between S3 buckets in the same region is free. Transfer to other AWS services in the same region is free.
Egress between AWS regions is also billed ($0.02/GB between most regions), which catches teams running cross-region replication for compliance or disaster recovery.
To put $0.09/GB in perspective: serving 1 TB to end users costs $90 in S3 egress alone, on top of storage and requests. Compare this with Cloudflare R2 which charges $0 for egress regardless of volume.
The free tier in 2026
AWS changed its free tier structure in mid-2025. Instead of the historical 5 GB / 20,000 GET / 2,000 PUT per month free for 12 months, new accounts now receive $200 in AWS Free Tier credits valid for 6 months. The credits can be applied to any AWS service, including S3.
This is more flexible but harder to forecast. Whether $200 covers your usage depends on what you store and how often you access it. For pure storage of ~8 TB Standard for 6 months, $200 is roughly enough. For request- or egress-heavy workloads, you will burn through it much faster.
Real-world pricing examples
These examples use S3 Standard in us-east-1 with no commitments or discounts.
Example 1: SaaS storing user-generated content
- 2 TB of files stored in Standard
- 5 million PUTs and 50 million GETs per month
- 500 GB egress to end users
| Line item | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | 2,048 GB × $0.023 | $47.10 |
| PUT requests | 5,000 × $0.005 | $25.00 |
| GET requests | 50,000 × $0.0004 | $20.00 |
| Egress | (500 − 100) × $0.09 | $36.00 |
| Total | $128.10/month |
Example 2: Media library serving video to public
- 10 TB of video in Standard
- 100,000 PUTs and 5 million GETs per month
- 20 TB egress
| Line item | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | 10,240 GB × $0.023 | $235.52 |
| PUT requests | 100 × $0.005 | $0.50 |
| GET requests | 5,000 × $0.0004 | $2.00 |
| Egress (first 100 GB free) | (10,240 − 100) × $0.09 + (10,240) × $0.085 | $1,783.40 |
| Total | ~$2,021/month |
Egress alone is 88% of the bill for the second example. This is the workload type where Cloudflare R2 or a CDN-fronted setup becomes dramatically cheaper.
Example 3: Backups with Glacier Deep Archive
- 50 TB in Glacier Deep Archive
- 1,000 PUTs per month (daily incremental uploads)
- No retrievals during normal operation
| Line item | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | 51,200 GB × $0.00099 | $50.69 |
| PUT requests | 1 × $0.05 | $0.05 |
| Egress | 0 | $0 |
| Total | $50.74/month |
Same 50 TB in Standard would cost over $1,177/month. The trade-off: retrieval takes up to 12 hours and a full restore would cost ~$1,000 in retrieval fees + egress.
Hidden costs and common surprises
- Cross-region replication. Replicating an object to another region costs you the destination region’s storage plus inter-region data transfer ($0.02/GB) plus a replication PUT.
- Lifecycle transition requests. Moving objects between storage classes is not free. Transition to Glacier costs $0.05 per 1,000 requests.
- S3 Transfer Acceleration. Adds $0.04 to $0.08/GB on top of standard egress.
- VPC endpoints for S3. Gateway endpoints are free, but interface endpoints (PrivateLink) charge $0.01/hour per AZ plus data processing.
- Early deletion fees. Deleting a Standard-IA object before 30 days, a Glacier IR before 90 days, or a Deep Archive before 180 days bills you for the full minimum period.
- Object metadata storage. Glacier classes charge for 40 KB of metadata per object (32 KB at Glacier rate, 8 KB at Standard rate) regardless of object size. This penalizes archiving many small files.
When AWS S3 makes sense
S3 is the right choice when:
- You need deep AWS integration (Lambda, Athena, CloudFront, Glue, EMR, etc.) and the cost of moving data out exceeds the savings of an alternative provider.
- You need advanced features other providers do not match: object lock for regulatory compliance, S3 Object Lambda for in-flight transformations, S3 Inventory and Storage Lens for audit, lifecycle policies with multi-class transitions.
- Your egress patterns are mostly internal to AWS (other AWS services in the same region), where transfer is free.
- You are storing rarely-accessed archive data where Deep Archive at $0.00099/GB is unbeatable on price.
S3 becomes expensive when:
- You serve large volumes of data to end users on the public internet. At any meaningful scale, Cloudflare R2 (zero egress) saves dramatic amounts.
- You have very high request rates against many small objects. Wasabi at $6.99/TB with no request fees is cheaper if you can live with its 90-day minimum.
- You want predictable monthly costs. DigitalOcean Spaces at $5/month flat is easier to forecast.
For a head-to-head comparison of all four providers, see S3 vs R2 vs Spaces vs Wasabi.
Manage your S3 buckets from a better interface
The AWS Console works for occasional configuration, but it was not built for day-to-day file management. Browsing thousands of objects, generating shareable links, organizing media into galleries or accepting uploads from external collaborators all become cumbersome.
Nubbo connects directly to AWS S3 and gives you a visual interface for the operations the native console makes painful: file browsing, secure sharing with passwords and expiration, photo and video galleries for client delivery and file requests to accept uploads. Your data never passes through Nubbo’s servers: every transfer happens directly between your browser and S3 using presigned URLs. You can connect multiple providers in the same account, so AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, DigitalOcean Spaces and Wasabi all live in one interface.
Create your free account and connect your first bucket in under two minutes.