AWS Lake Formation pricing calculator
Storage API & Governed Tables. 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 Lake Formation pricing works
What you pay for
- Permissions management, tag-based access control and data sharing: no additional charge.
- Storage API (row/cell-level filtering by integrated engines): $2.25 per TB scanned ($0.0022/GB).
- Governed table metadata storage and requests, storage optimiser processing; Glue Data Catalog, S3 and query engines billed by those services.
Common cost traps
- Fine-grained filtering through the storage API is billed per TB scanned on top of the query engine's own charge.
- Cross-account sharing can create many catalog objects and requests.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use table- and column-level permissions where they meet requirements; row/cell filters add scan charges.
- Partition and compress data so the storage API scans less.
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. Lake Formation permissions have no charge on any plan. The Glue Data Catalog always-free allowance (1 M objects, 1 M requests) applies to the underlying catalog.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Lake Formation?
Lake Formation storage API scans, governed table metadata and requests, and storage optimisation are eligible usage and are offset by credits; Glue, S3 and query engines are billed separately. 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 | $2.25 | 4,444.4 mo. | 11,111.1 mo. | 44,444.4 mo. |
| Medium | $162.50 | 61.5 mo. | 153.8 mo. | 615.4 mo. |
| Large | $1,287.50 | 7.8 mo. | 19.4 mo. | 77.7 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
Small data lake: 1 TB scanned through the storage API (permissions are free; catalog within the Glue free tier) | Storage API data scanned: 1,024 GB x $0.00219727 = $2.25 | Total ~$2.25/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
50 TB scanned through the storage API, 5 M metadata objects | Storage API data scanned: 51,200 GB x $0.00219727 = $112.50; Metadata objects: 5,000,000 object-months x $0.00001 = $50.00 | Total ~$162.50/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
500 TB scanned through the storage API, 50 TB processed by storage optimiser, 50 M requests | Storage API data scanned: 512,000 GB x $0.00219727 = $1,125.00; Storage optimiser processed: 51,200 GB x $0.00219727 = $112.50; API requests: 50,000,000 requests x $0.000001 = $50.00 | Total ~$1,287.50/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Lake Formation pricing FAQ
Is Lake Formation free?
Permissions and sharing are free. You pay for storage API scans, governed table metadata and storage optimisation, plus the Glue, S3 and query engine charges.
What does the storage API cost?
$2.25 per TB scanned in this data ($0.0022 per GB).
Do credits cover Lake Formation?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
Why does my Athena bill not change after enabling Lake Formation?
Basic permissions add no charge; only fine-grained filtering via the storage API adds a scan fee.
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
- Governed tables have been de-emphasised by AWS; confirm whether governed-table charges still apply.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card lakeformation (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/lake-formation/pricing/ before publishing.