Amazon SQS pricing calculator
Standard & FIFO Queue Costs. 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 SQS pricing works
What you pay for
- Requests per million: standard $0.40 (first 100 B), FIFO $0.50; every 64 KB chunk of a request counts as one request.
- Send, receive, delete, change-visibility and empty receives all count as requests.
- Data transfer out of the Region; transfer within the Region is free.
Common cost traps
- Short polling produces many empty receives, each billed.
- Large messages count as several requests (64 KB chunks) and messages over 256 KB need S3 via the extended client.
- Failed messages retried repeatedly multiply requests; set a dead-letter queue.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use long polling (WaitTimeSeconds up to 20).
- Batch send, receive and delete (up to 10 messages per call) to cut requests up to 10x.
- Configure dead-letter queues and sensible maxReceiveCount.
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. Always free on both plans: 1 M SQS requests per month.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon SQS?
SQS standard, FIFO and fair-queue requests 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 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 | $4.00 | 2,500.0 mo. | 6,250.0 mo. | 25,000.0 mo. |
| Medium | $250.00 | 40.0 mo. | 100.0 mo. | 400.0 mo. |
| Large | $5,092.16 | 2.0 mo. | 4.9 mo. | 19.6 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
10 M requests on standard queues | Standard requests: 10 million x $0.4 = $4.00 | Total ~$4.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
500 M standard requests and 100 M FIFO requests | Standard requests: 500 million x $0.4 = $200.00; FIFO requests: 100 million x $0.5 = $50.00 | Total ~$250.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
10 B standard requests, 2 B FIFO requests, 1 TB internet egress | Standard requests: 10,000 million x $0.4 = $4,000.00; FIFO requests: 2,000 million x $0.5 = $1,000.00; Data transfer out: 1,024 GB x $0.09 = $92.16 | Total ~$5,092.16/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon SQS pricing FAQ
What counts as a request?
Every API action (send, receive, delete, change visibility, purge), including receives that return no messages, and each 64 KB chunk of payload.
How do I reduce SQS cost?
Use long polling and batch actions; 10-message batches cut request counts by up to 90%.
Is the 1 M free requests per month permanent?
Yes, it is always free on both the new and legacy plans.
Do credits cover SQS?
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.