Amazon Route 53 pricing calculator

Hosted Zones, Resolver, Profiles & DNS Firewall. 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 Route 53 pricing works

What you pay for

Hosted zones ($0.50/month each for the first 25, $0.10 after); zones deleted within 12 hours of creation are not charged.
Authoritative queries per million by routing type (standard $0.40, latency $0.60, geo $0.70, IP-based $0.80 for the first billion); alias queries to AWS resources are free.
Health checks per month (AWS vs non-AWS endpoints, optional features extra), Traffic Flow policy records ($50/month each).
Resolver endpoints per ENI-hour ($0.125) and Resolver queries; DNS Firewall queries; Profiles; Global Resolver.

Common cost traps

Domain registration and renewals are excluded from credits and bill to your payment method.
Resolver endpoints need at least two ENIs and cost about $182/month each even with low traffic.
Each Traffic Flow policy record is $50/month.
Non-alias CNAMEs to AWS resources are billed queries, while alias records are free.
Short TTLs multiply query volume.

Ways to reduce cost

Use alias records for AWS targets.
Use longer TTLs on stable records.
Share Resolver endpoints across VPCs and accounts with Resolver rules instead of creating one per VPC.
Remove unused hosted zones and health checks.

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. Route 53 is not part of the 12-month Free Tier. The AWS free-tier directory lists basic health checks for AWS endpoints as free (up to 50). Alias queries to CloudFront, ELB, S3 websites and API Gateway are free on all plans. Domain registration is never free and is not covered by credits.

02 · AWS credits & runway

Do credits cover Amazon Route 53?

Route 53 hosted zones, DNS queries, health checks, Traffic Flow policy records, Resolver endpoints and queries, DNS Firewall, Profiles and Global Resolver 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 credits

Excluded charges & conditions

Domain name registration, renewal and transfer fees are explicitly excluded from promotional credits.
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.

Estimated months before expiry limits, by credit amount
Usage profile	Monthly estimate	$10,000	$25,000	$100,000
Small	$4.50	2,222.2 mo.	5,555.6 mo.	22,222.2 mo.
Medium	$317.50	31.5 mo.	78.7 mo.	315.0 mo.
Large	$2,142.50	4.7 mo.	11.7 mo.	46.7 mo.

Small profile assumptions

3 hosted zones, 5 M standard queries, 2 health checks on AWS endpoints | Hosted zones: 3 zones x $0.5 = $1.50; Standard queries: 5 million x $0.4 = $2.00; Health checks (AWS endpoints): 2 checks x $0.5 = $1.00 | Total ~$4.50/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.

Medium profile assumptions

20 hosted zones, 200 M standard + 50 M latency queries, 20 health checks on non-AWS endpoints, 1 Resolver inbound endpoint (2 ENIs) | Hosted zones: 20 zones x $0.5 = $10.00; Standard queries: 200 million x $0.4 = $80.00; Latency queries: 50 million x $0.6 = $30.00; Health checks (non-AWS): 20 checks x $0.75 = $15.00; Resolver endpoint ENIs: 1,460 ENI-hours x $0.125 = $182.50 | Total ~$317.50/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.

Large profile assumptions

25 zones, 1 B geo queries, 4 Resolver endpoints (8 ENIs), 2 B Resolver queries, 2 Traffic Flow policy records | Hosted zones: 25 zones x $0.5 = $12.50; Geo queries: 1,000 million x $0.7 = $700.00; Resolver endpoint ENIs: 5,840 ENI-hours x $0.125 = $730.00; Resolver queries (first 1 B): 1,000 million x $0.4 = $400.00; Resolver queries (over 1 B): 1,000 million x $0.2 = $200.00; Traffic Flow policy records: 2 records x $50 = $100.00 | Total ~$2,142.50/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.

04 · Questions

Amazon Route 53 pricing FAQ

Do credits pay for my domain name?

No. Route 53 domain registration and transfer fees are excluded from AWS promotional credits.

Are alias queries free?

Yes. Queries to alias records that point to AWS resources such as CloudFront, ELB, API Gateway or S3 website endpoints are not charged.

What does a hosted zone cost?

$0.50 per month for each of the first 25 zones and $0.10 per month after that, plus queries.

Why is Resolver expensive?

Each Resolver endpoint uses at least two ENIs at $0.125/hour each, about $182.50 per endpoint per month, before query charges.

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

Free health checks for AWS endpoints come from the AWS free-tier directory, which may be dated.
Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card route53 (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/ before publishing.