AWS Backup pricing calculator
Estimate Backup Storage 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 AWS Backup pricing works
What you pay for
- Backup storage per GB-month by resource type and tier (warm, cold where supported).
- Restore charges per GB for some resource types (EFS, S3, DynamoDB).
- Cross-Region and cross-account copy data transfer; logically air-gapped vaults; Backup Audit Manager and restore testing per job.
Common cost traps
- Cold storage has a 90-day minimum; deleting earlier is billed for the full 90 days.
- Daily backups with long retention multiply storage; EBS backups are incremental but S3 backups store changed objects.
- Cross-Region copies add data transfer ($0.02/GB between us-east-1 and us-west-2) and a second copy of storage.
- Restores for EFS, S3 and DynamoDB are charged per GB.
Ways to reduce cost
- Set retention per data class instead of one long policy for everything.
- Move long-term EFS and DynamoDB backups to cold storage after a week or more.
- Copy only critical backups cross-Region.
- Use tag-based backup plans so test and temporary resources are excluded.
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 AWS Backup Free Tier as such; the free snapshot allowances of the underlying services (for example RDS backup storage up to 100% of provisioned storage) still apply. New-plan accounts can pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Backup?
AWS Backup storage (warm and cold), restores, cross-Region copy transfer, Backup Audit Manager and restore testing 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 | $44.50 | 224.7 mo. | 561.8 mo. | 2,247.2 mo. |
| Medium | $554.40 | 18.0 mo. | 45.1 mo. | 180.4 mo. |
| Large | $4,727.81 | 2.1 mo. | 5.3 mo. | 21.2 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
500 GB of EBS backups, 200 GB EFS warm backups, 50 GB DynamoDB backups | EBS backup storage: 500 GB-month x $0.0575 = $28.75; EFS warm backup: 200 GB-month x $0.05 = $10.00; DynamoDB backup: 50 GB-month x $0.115 = $5.75 | Total ~$44.50/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
5 TB EBS, 2 TB EFS warm + 5 TB EFS cold, 2 TB S3 backups, 200 GB EFS restore | EBS backup storage: 5,120 GB-month x $0.0575 = $294.40; EFS warm backup: 2,048 GB-month x $0.05 = $102.40; EFS cold backup: 5,120 GB-month x $0.01 = $51.20; S3 backup: 2,048 GB-month x $0.05 = $102.40; EFS warm restore: 200 GB x $0.02 = $4.00 | Total ~$554.40/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
50 TB EBS, 20 TB S3, 50 TB EFS cold, 10 TB Aurora snapshots beyond free | EBS backup storage: 51,200 GB-month x $0.0575 = $2,944.00; S3 backup: 20,480 GB-month x $0.05 = $1,024.00; EFS cold backup: 51,200 GB-month x $0.01 = $512.00; Aurora backup: 10,240 GB-month x $0.0242 = $247.81 | Total ~$4,727.81/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Backup pricing FAQ
Is AWS Backup more expensive than native snapshots?
For EBS the storage rate is similar to snapshots in this data ($0.0575 vs $0.05). AWS Backup adds central policies, cold storage for some types and audit features.
When does cold storage pay off?
For backups kept longer than about 90 days. EFS cold storage is $0.01/GB-month versus $0.05 warm, but restores cost more and there is a 90-day minimum.
Are restores free?
Not for all types. EFS, S3 and DynamoDB restores are charged per GB.
Do credits cover cross-Region copies?
Yes, both the transfer and the extra storage are 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
- Comparison of AWS Backup EBS rate ($0.0575) with native snapshots ($0.05) comes from the snapshot data; confirm on the pricing page.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card backup (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/ before publishing.