Amazon RDS pricing calculator
All Database Engines. 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 RDS pricing works
What you pay for
- DB instance hours by engine, instance class and deployment (Single-AZ, Multi-AZ instance, Multi-AZ cluster), billed per second after a 10-minute minimum for most engines.
- Storage per GB-month (gp2/gp3/io1/io2/magnetic) plus provisioned IOPS and throughput where applicable; Multi-AZ doubles storage.
- Backup storage beyond 100% of provisioned storage per Region, snapshot export, and manual snapshots kept after deletion.
- Extended Support per vCPU-hour for major versions past end of standard support; RDS Proxy, Performance Insights long retention, data transfer.
Common cost traps
- Extended Support charges start automatically when a major version (for example older MySQL or PostgreSQL) leaves standard support, and are billed per vCPU-hour.
- Multi-AZ doubles the instance price and the storage charge.
- Stopped instances restart automatically after 7 days and storage keeps billing while stopped.
- Manual snapshots and snapshots retained after instance deletion keep billing at $0.095/GB-month.
- Read replicas in other AZs or Regions add replication data transfer.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use Graviton (db.m7g/db.r7g) classes and gp3 storage.
- Buy No Upfront Reserved Instances for steady databases (db.m7g.large Single-AZ $0.1297 vs $0.168/hour here) so credits still apply.
- Upgrade engine versions before end of standard support to avoid Extended Support fees.
- Use Single-AZ for dev/test and delete old manual snapshots.
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: 750 hours/month of Single-AZ db.t2.micro, db.t3.micro or db.t4g.micro (MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQL Server Express), 20 GB of General Purpose storage and 20 GB of backup storage for 12 months. New-plan accounts pay RDS from Free Tier credits. Backup storage up to the size of your provisioned database storage is always included at no charge.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon RDS?
RDS instance hours (On-Demand and the hourly fee of No Upfront Reserved Instances), storage, provisioned IOPS, backup storage beyond the free allowance, Extended Support, RDS Proxy and data transfer 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 on All Upfront / Partial Upfront RDS Reserved Instances.
- Oracle or SQL Server licences you bring yourself (BYOL); licence-included editions are billed by AWS.
- 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 | $15.88 | 629.7 mo. | 1,574.3 mo. | 6,297.2 mo. |
| Medium | $311.01 | 32.2 mo. | 80.4 mo. | 321.5 mo. |
| Large | $2,532.40 | 3.9 mo. | 9.9 mo. | 39.5 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
PostgreSQL db.t4g.micro Single-AZ 24/7, 20 GB gp3, 20 GB extra backup | db.t4g.micro Single-AZ: 730 hours x $0.016 = $11.68; gp3 storage: 20 GB-month x $0.115 = $2.30; Backup storage beyond free: 20 GB-month x $0.095 = $1.90 | Total ~$15.88/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
PostgreSQL db.m7g.large Multi-AZ 24/7, 200 GB gp3, 200 GB extra backup | db.m7g.large Multi-AZ: 730 hours x $0.337 = $246.01; gp3 storage (Multi-AZ billed x2): 400 GB-month x $0.115 = $46.00; Backup storage beyond free: 200 GB-month x $0.095 = $19.00 | Total ~$311.01/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
PostgreSQL db.r7g.xlarge Multi-AZ primary + 2 db.r7g.xlarge Single-AZ read replicas, 2 TB gp3 each copy, 2 TB extra backup | db.r7g.xlarge Multi-AZ: 730 hours x $0.956 = $697.88; db.r7g.xlarge read replicas: 1,460 hours x $0.478 = $697.88; gp3 storage (2 Multi-AZ copies + 2 replicas): 8,192 GB-month x $0.115 = $942.08; Backup storage beyond free: 2,048 GB-month x $0.095 = $194.56 | Total ~$2,532.40/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon RDS pricing FAQ
Do credits cover RDS Reserved Instances?
Only the recurring hourly charge. Upfront payments on All Upfront or Partial Upfront RIs are excluded from promotional credits, so No Upfront RIs keep the full benefit of credits.
What is RDS Extended Support?
A paid option that keeps a major engine version running after its standard support ends. RDS enrols databases automatically and bills per vCPU-hour until you upgrade.
Is backup storage free?
Backup storage up to 100% of your provisioned database storage in a Region is included. Above that it costs $0.095/GB-month in us-east-1.
Is the 750-hour RDS free tier still offered?
Only to accounts created before 15 July 2025, in their first 12 months. Newer accounts can run small instances from Free Tier credits.
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
- Multi-AZ storage doubling is modelled by doubling GB; confirm with the RDS pricing page for Multi-AZ DB clusters, which bill differently.