AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) pricing calculator
On-Demand & Serverless Migration 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 Database Migration Service (DMS) pricing works
What you pay for
- Replication instance hours by class and Single-AZ/Multi-AZ, with included storage (50-100 GB); extra gp2 storage per GB-month.
- DMS Serverless: DCU-hours, scaling between your minimum and maximum.
- Homogeneous data migrations per hour; Schema Conversion; data transfer out or across Regions/AZs.
Common cost traps
- Replication instances left running after a migration keep billing.
- Multi-AZ doubles the instance price.
- Full loads across Regions or out of AWS add data transfer.
- Undersized instances make migrations run longer and cost more in total.
Ways to reduce cost
- Delete replication instances and endpoints as soon as cutover is done.
- Use Serverless for variable CDC loads.
- Use Single-AZ for one-off migrations where a restart is acceptable.
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. Listed by AWS as a free offer: 750 hours per month of Single-AZ dms.t3.micro (older directory: dms.t2.micro) with 50 GB of gp2 storage. AWS has also offered DMS free for some time when migrating into Aurora, Redshift, DynamoDB or DocumentDB; confirm current terms.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)?
DMS replication instance hours, DMS Serverless DCU-hours, extra storage, Schema Conversion 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
- Source or target database licences.
- 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 | $54.38 | 183.9 mo. | 459.7 mo. | 1,838.9 mo. |
| Medium | $303.69 | 32.9 mo. | 82.3 mo. | 329.3 mo. |
| Large | $3,827.98 | 2.6 mo. | 6.5 mo. | 26.1 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
One dms.t3.medium Single-AZ replication instance for a month-long migration | dms.t3.medium Single-AZ: 730 hours x $0.0745 = $54.38 | Total ~$54.38/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
dms.r6i.large Multi-AZ for ongoing CDC replication, 200 GB extra Multi-AZ storage | dms.r6i.large Multi-AZ: 730 hours x $0.353 = $257.69; Extra storage (Multi-AZ gp2): 200 GB-month x $0.23 = $46.00 | Total ~$303.69/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
DMS Serverless averaging 32 DCUs Multi-AZ for continuous replication | Serverless DCUs Multi-AZ: 23,360 DCU-hours x $0.163869 = $3,827.98 | Total ~$3,827.98/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) pricing FAQ
Is DMS free?
There is a free allowance (750 hours/month of Single-AZ dms.t3.micro and 50 GB storage), and AWS has run free-migration offers for some targets. Larger instances and Serverless are billed.
What does a small migration cost?
In us-east-1 a dms.t3.medium Single-AZ instance is $0.0745/hour, about $54 for a full month.
Does Multi-AZ matter?
For long-running CDC it improves availability, but it doubles the instance price.
Do credits cover DMS?
Yes, all DMS charges 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
- DMS free-tier wording (instance class, always-free vs 12-month) and free-migration offers should be confirmed on the pricing page.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card dms (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/dms/pricing/ before publishing.