Amazon Athena pricing calculator
SQL Queries, Provisioned Capacity & Spark. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How Amazon Athena pricing works
What you pay for
- SQL queries: $5 per TB scanned, rounded up to the nearest MB with a 10 MB minimum per query; DDL and failed queries are free.
- Provisioned Capacity: $0.30 per DPU-hour (minimum 24 DPUs) for predictable workloads.
- Apache Spark: $0.35 per DPU-hour; federated queries also bill the Lambda connectors they use.
- Indirect: S3 GET/LIST requests and query result storage, Glue Data Catalog requests.
Common cost traps
- SELECT * on unpartitioned CSV or JSON scans everything, every time.
- Dashboards refreshing every few minutes rescan the same data.
- Many small files increase S3 request charges and slow queries.
- Query results accumulate in the S3 results bucket.
Ways to reduce cost
- Convert data to Parquet or ORC with compression (often 80-90% less scanned).
- Partition by date or other filters and use partition projection.
- Enable query result reuse and set per-workgroup data scan limits.
- Add a lifecycle rule to the results bucket.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. No Athena Free Tier. Glue Data Catalog always-free allowances (1 M objects and 1 M requests per month) cover most small catalogs. New-plan accounts can pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon Athena?
Athena SQL queries (per TB scanned), Provisioned Capacity DPU-hours, Spark DPU-hours and federated queries are eligible usage and are offset by credits, together with the S3 and Glue charges they create. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $10.00 | 1,000.0 mo. | 2,500.0 mo. | 10,000.0 mo. |
| Medium | $270.00 | 37.0 mo. | 92.6 mo. | 370.4 mo. |
| Large | $5,756.00 | 1.7 mo. | 4.3 mo. | 17.4 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
2 TB scanned per month by ad-hoc SQL | SQL data scanned: 2 TB x $5 = $10.00 | Total ~$10.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
40 TB scanned, 200 DPU-hours of Spark notebooks | SQL data scanned: 40 TB x $5 = $200.00; Spark DPU-hours: 200 DPU-hours x $0.35 = $70.00 | Total ~$270.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
Provisioned Capacity 24 DPUs (the minimum) 24/7 for dashboards, plus 100 TB scanned on-demand | Provisioned DPUs: 17,520 DPU-hours x $0.3 = $5,256.00; SQL data scanned: 100 TB x $5 = $500.00 | Total ~$5,756.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon Athena pricing FAQ
How much does a query cost?
$5 per TB scanned in us-east-1, at least 10 MB per query. A query scanning 50 GB costs about $0.24.
Are failed queries billed?
No. Failed queries and DDL statements are not charged; cancelled queries are billed for data scanned up to cancellation.
When is Provisioned Capacity better?
When you run steady, high query volumes and want a predictable bill or isolation; you pay $0.30 per DPU-hour with a 24-DPU minimum.
Do credits cover Athena?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.
Verification notes
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card athena (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/athena/pricing/ before publishing.