Amazon EFS pricing calculator
Elastic Throughput & Storage Classes. 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 EFS pricing works
What you pay for
- Storage per GB-month: Standard $0.30, Infrequent Access $0.016, Archive $0.008 (Regional); One Zone Standard $0.16.
- Elastic throughput: $0.03/GB read and $0.06/GB written; IA/Archive reads and lifecycle tiering billed per GB.
- Provisioned throughput (per MB/s-month) if chosen; Bursting has no extra throughput fee.
- Replication to another Region and cross-AZ/inter-Region transfer.
Common cost traps
- Standard is about 19x the price of IA per GB; without lifecycle management everything stays in Standard.
- Elastic throughput bills every GB read and written, so scans, backups and antivirus jobs can cost more than storage.
- IA and Archive have per-GB access fees and minimum storage durations, so wrongly tiered hot data costs more.
- Clients mounting from another AZ add cross-AZ transfer charges with One Zone file systems.
Ways to reduce cost
- Enable lifecycle policies (for example move to IA after 30 days, to Archive after 90 days).
- Use One Zone storage for re-creatable data.
- For steady high throughput, compare Provisioned or Bursting with Elastic.
- For very large, sequential datasets, compare with S3 or FSx for Lustre.
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. Legacy accounts: 5 GB of EFS Standard storage for 12 months. New-plan accounts pay from Free Tier credits. No always-free EFS allowance.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon EFS?
EFS storage in all classes, data access charges (Elastic throughput reads/writes, IA/Archive access and tiering), provisioned throughput and replication are eligible usage and are offset by credits. 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 | $39.00 | 256.4 mo. | 641.0 mo. | 2,564.1 mo. |
| Medium | $498.62 | 20.1 mo. | 50.1 mo. | 200.6 mo. |
| Large | $3,235.84 | 3.1 mo. | 7.7 mo. | 30.9 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
100 GB Standard (Regional), 200 GB read and 50 GB written per month with Elastic throughput | Standard storage: 100 GB-month x $0.3 = $30.00; Elastic reads: 200 GB x $0.03 = $6.00; Elastic writes: 50 GB x $0.06 = $3.00 | Total ~$39.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
1 TB Standard + 4 TB Infrequent Access, 3 TB read, 500 GB written, 300 GB IA reads | Standard storage: 1,024 GB-month x $0.3 = $307.20; IA storage: 4,096 GB-month x $0.016 = $65.54; Elastic reads: 3,072 GB x $0.03 = $92.16; Elastic writes: 512 GB x $0.06 = $30.72; IA reads: 300 GB x $0.01 = $3.00 | Total ~$498.62/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
5 TB Standard + 30 TB IA + 50 TB Archive, 20 TB read, 3 TB written | Standard storage: 5,120 GB-month x $0.3 = $1,536.00; IA storage: 30,720 GB-month x $0.016 = $491.52; Archive storage: 51,200 GB-month x $0.008 = $409.60; Elastic reads: 20,480 GB x $0.03 = $614.40; Elastic writes: 3,072 GB x $0.06 = $184.32 | Total ~$3,235.84/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon EFS pricing FAQ
Why are reads and writes charged?
With Elastic throughput (the default for new file systems) EFS bills per GB transferred: $0.03 per GB read and $0.06 per GB written in us-east-1.
How much does lifecycle management save?
Moving 1 TB from Standard ($0.30/GB) to IA ($0.016/GB) cuts storage from about $307 to about $16 a month, before IA access fees.
Is EFS covered by credits?
Yes, all EFS charges are eligible usage.
Regional or One Zone?
One Zone costs about half as much as Regional Standard but stores data in a single AZ. Use it for data you can recreate.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.