AWS charges data transfer costs when you link several AWS services or move from one availability region to the other. Outbound data transfer costs, also known as egress costs, apply when using routing services and Content Delivery Networks.

One of the leading culprits of hidden costs are Egress Costs, because it can be challenging to track how your data moves. For example, users report excess charges on cloud BI (business intelligence) even within AWS free tier. The chances are that you exceeded free tier data transfer limits. In a snapshot, data transfer costs occur when:

  • You use a two-way data transfer model, and there’s a cost for inbound or outbound data transfer.
  • Egress costs occur when moving data from one availability region to another region with higher data transfer costs.
  • You will incur data transfer costs when linking multiple services such as EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), S3 (Simple Storage Service), and CDN (Content Delivery Network).

Also Read: Reduce AWS Data Transfer Costs: Don’t Get Stung by Hefty Egress Fees

What are AWS Egress Costs?

Egress costs are AWS charges for data leaving a service or region—and they’re one of the most common sources of unplanned cloud spend. Conceptually, think of egress as data exit tolls: every time your data crosses a boundary—whether it’s to the internet, a different AWS region, or even another Availability Zone (AZ)—you pay for it.

The problem? These boundaries aren’t always obvious in your architecture.

For example, if a reporting dashboard pulls data from S3 buckets in another region or queries an RDS database across AZs, you’re incurring egress fees—even if the services are all “within AWS.” Similarly, if EC2 pulls content from S3 and serves it to users globally without using CloudFront, outbound internet traffic can get expensive fast.

Types of Data Transfer that Incur Egress Costs

AWS charges data transfer costs when you link services across zones or regions, or move data out of AWS entirely. These fees can apply in places you might not expect—especially in high-traffic, data-intensive applications.

Transfer Type When It Incur Egress Costs
Service-to-service (cross-AZ or cross-region) When EC2, S3, RDS, or Lambda communicate across Availability Zones or regions
Cross-region replication Transferring data between AWS regions (e.g., S3 replication from us-east-1 to eu-west-1)
Public internet access Serving data directly from EC2 or S3 to end users without using CloudFront
NAT Gateway or VPN traffic Routing outbound traffic through NAT Gateways or site-to-site VPNs
BI and analytics tools Pulling large volumes of data across zones or regions, especially in tools like QuickSight or Looker

How Much Does AWS Charge for Data Egress?

Egress pricing depends on where your data is going—and the volume being transferred. While inbound traffic is typically free, outbound traffic is not.

  • To the public internet: ~$0.09/GB for the first 10 TB each month, with tiered discounts at higher usage levels. The first 1 GB per month is free.
  • Between Availability Zones: ~$0.01/GB per direction, even within the same region.
  • Between regions: ~$0.02–$0.09/GB depending on source and destination. Inter-region traffic is never free.
  • Through NAT Gateways: Charged both per hour and per GB of data processed.

AWS Egress Pricing Changes in 2025

Recently, AWS made two significant updates to its egress pricing strategy—both aimed at improving customer flexibility and responding to growing pressure around data portability and hidden costs.

1. Free Tier Increased from 1 GB to 100 GB per Month
Previously, AWS only offered 1 GB of free data transfer out to the internet per month. As of 2025, that threshold has been expanded to 100 GB per month, giving customers more breathing room—especially for small-scale web apps, prototypes, or workloads just outside the Free Tier. This change applies to most AWS services and regions (excluding China and GovCloud) and helps reduce surprise overage charges for low-volume use cases.

2. Egress Fee Waivers for Cloud Migration
In response to regulatory scrutiny and industry demands for better data portability, AWS now waives egress fees for customers migrating data off of AWS—to another cloud provider or back on-premises. The waiver is conditional, typically requiring that the migration is legitimate, planned, and approved through AWS support. This change marks a notable shift, especially for large enterprises concerned about vendor lock-in.

These updates represent a growing trend across cloud providers to increase pricing transparency and reduce the friction of switching platforms. Whether you’re scaling a new app or planning a migration, it’s now a little easier to control outbound data costs on AWS.

How Are AWS Egress Costs Calculated?

Due to the dynamic nature of data transfer costs, the best way of estimating costs is using the AWS Cost Explorer. The Cost Explorer is a deep visibility tool that could give insights into Egress activities. You can view data transfer costs by month service and forecast future costs based on past usage patterns.

To analyze your data transfer costs:

  • Use cost allocation tags to label every resource in your infrastructure, which will help in the accurate reporting of data.
  • Open the Cost and Usage Reports over a period you want to analyze. Select each service to filter data transfer cost by service.
  • Filter the usage type group; this groups data transfer costs from regions, inter-availability zones, and the Internet.
  • Check all inbound and outbound data transfer costs, click Apply. Download the CSV for further analysis.

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How to Reduce AWS Egress Fees?

You can reduce AWS Egress fees by understanding the mechanics of cloud networking. Begin by using a private IP address, free CDN, or architect your apps with a cache.

Use a CDN

Even though unit data transfer costs tend to decrease with higher data volumes, the total cost of moving large Terabytes of data could still get out of control. Content Delivery Networks compress files, images, and videos, which reduces the size of data transferred. CDNs not only helps in faster data transfers it also reduces the total cost. Amazon Cloudfront is a content delivery network that transfers data fast, under low latency. In addition, you can store data in the Amazon S3 bucket for free. AWS Cloudfront will transfer your data via low-cost data centers.

Use a Private IP Address

If you only want to transfer data within an organization, consider using a private IP address. A private IP address eliminates data transfer costs associated with a public IP. In addition, a private IP is more secure than a public IP, which reduces any chance of misconfiguration, which increases data transfer costs. The AWS Direct Connect service lets you move data within on-premise networks and the public cloud at fewer costs. The direct connect service reduces data transfer costs by eliminating the high bandwidth internet service and offers lower egress rates for files more than 10 GB.

Limit Outbound Data Transfer

In real life, outbound data transfer rates cost more than inbound data transfers. You can consider using lightweight methods of distributing content, like text. Also, compress images, videos, and files. Avoiding duplicate content also limits outbound data transfer costs. It’s equally important to consider unique businesses that may need to transfer massive terabytes of data. These include Mapping services, GIS services, Satellites, and Space Exploration organizations. If you feel left out of the typical data transfer rates, consider negotiating a private agreement with AWS Enterprise.

Maintain a Single Availability Region

Choosing another availability region may not always affect performance. Deploying your servers in US Central (Iowa), North Virginia, and South Africa gives you the lowest rates on data transfer costs. Due to geographical tax regimes, some regions are not eligible for free-tier discounts. Local and regional businesses can maintain their traffic within a single region by blocking external IP addresses and ports.

Use AWS Free Tier

The AWS free tier lets you transfer data free for one year, provided you don’t exceed the limits. The quota for the forever-free plan is up to 1GB per month.

How AWS Egress Pricing Compares To GCP And Azure

While all major cloud providers charge for outbound data transfer, there are key differences in pricing models, free tier allowances, and regional pricing structures.

AWS now offers the largest free tier for internet egress (100 GB/month), but still charges for cross-AZ traffic—something GCP and Azure often waive. GCP tends to be more aggressive with cost reduction on inter-region traffic and CDN usage. Azure’s pricing is broadly similar to AWS but varies more by workload and service.

Here’s a table summarizing how AWS stacks up against Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure in 2025:

 
Provider Free Tier (Internet Egress) Typical Starting Rate Notable Differences
AWS 100 GB/month (as of 2025) $0.09 per GB for first 10 TB Charges for cross-AZ traffic (~$0.01/GB), region-to-region varies ($0.02–$0.09/GB), fee waivers for migration off AWS
GCP 5 GB/month $0.12 per GB for first 1 TB No charge for same-zone traffic, lower inter-region costs for some services, more generous CDN egress via Cloud Load Balancing
Azure 5 GB/month $0.087 per GB for first 5 GB, then $0.09/GB Free intra-region traffic, similar region-to-region pricing to AWS, egress pricing varies by service

Additional Data Transfer Costs To Consider

Beyond standard egress charges to the internet or across regions, AWS data transfer pricing hides in places many teams don’t anticipate—especially in complex, service-heavy architectures. These aren’t always labeled “egress,” but they functionally increase outbound cost.

  • Cross-Service API Calls: Services like Lambda, Step Functions, and EventBridge often interact with other services (e.g., S3, DynamoDB, or RDS). If those calls traverse regions or AZs, you’re paying for the traffic—even if the logic looks simple.

  • VPC Peering and Transit Gateway: Moving data between VPCs—especially across regions or accounts—incurs charges. VPC peering is priced per GB, and Transit Gateway adds both data processing and per-GB transfer fees. These can escalate quickly in service-mesh or shared-infra environments.

  • Interface Endpoints (AWS PrivateLink): PrivateLink enables secure access to AWS services across VPCs, but charges a per-hour and per-GB rate. It’s great for security and compliance but easy to misuse for large, chatty data flows.

  • Data Transfer Through Load Balancers (ELB/ALB/NLB): While traffic from a client to a load balancer is free, traffic from the load balancer to the backend EC2 instance (or across AZs) is billable. This becomes a quiet cost center in distributed microservice deployments.

  • Logging, Monitoring, and Telemetry Pipelines: Pushing logs or metrics from one region to another (e.g., centralized observability tooling) introduces inter-region charges. Even CloudWatch dashboards that pull cross-region data can generate transfer costs at scale.

In short, not all data transfer is labeled clearly—especially when buried inside inter-service communication. 

How nOps Helps You Reduce AWS Egress Costs?

nOps offers a centralized platform for managing your AWS infrastructure and monitoring all AWS resources. It’s easy to see historical cloud billing data in interactive and visual dashboards instead of reviewing thousands of rows of data.

The tool’s intuitive filters allow you to group resources into meaningful categories so you can more easily identify patterns, unnecessary expenses, and act on reducing AWS egress charges. For in-depth insights, users can analyze costs on an hourly basis across all dimensions that contribute to spending, whether at the account, service, or resource level. This makes it easy to investigate, understand, predict and lower data transfer and other AWS costs. 

nOps is on a mission to empower engineers to more easily take action on cost optimization. We’re entrusted with over 2 billion dollars of AWS spend, and were recently ranked #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category.

Learn more about the nOps cloud optimization platform by booking a demo today!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the egress service fee?

The egress service fee refers to the cost of data transferred out of a cloud provider’s infrastructure to the internet or to another region. Egress AWS cost is commonly called “data transfer out” and applies when data leaves an AWS service, such as EC2 or S3, to reach users or external systems. 

How much does egress traffic cost?

Egress traffic costs in AWS depend on the region and amount of data transferred. For example, the first GB per month is usually free, but data transferred to the internet from EC2 typically starts around $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB. Prices decrease at higher volumes. Transfers between AWS regions or availability zones may also incur charges. 

How much does AWS LightSail egress cost?

AWS LightSail includes a fixed amount of free outbound data (egress) each month based on your plan—typically between 1 TB and 7 TB, depending on instance size. If you exceed that allowance, additional data transfer is billed at $0.09 per GB. 

What is the difference between ingress and egress in AWS?

In AWS, ingress refers to data coming into the cloud—like uploading files to S3 or receiving API requests—while egress refers to data leaving the cloud, such as serving a web page or transferring backups to an external location. Ingress is typically free in AWS, while egress is usually billed and can become expensive at scale.