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Amazon RDS

Why Amazon RDS?

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed, highly available, and secure database service that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale relational database management systems (RDBMS) in the cloud. Amazon RDS is free to try and you pay only for what you use with no minimum fees. You can pay for Amazon RDS using On-Demand or Reserved Instances. Estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Pricing Calculator.

Amazon RDS provides a selection of instance types optimized to fit different online transactional processing (OLTP) use cases. Select one of the Amazon RDS database (DB) engines below to view pricing. See Previous Generation Instances for previous instance pricing not listed here. 

AWS Pricing Calculator for Amazon RDS

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Increase database ROI

As data volume continues to grow, relational databases can grow with you without breaking your budget. Amazon RDS On-Demand Instances allow you to pay per second. Pay even less with Reserved Instances on a 1-year or 3-year term. You can easily start and stop your database instances to simply and affordably develop and test your applications. Avoid costly downtime using features like automated backups, database snapshots, and automatic failover.

Read how you can increase database ROI with Amazon RDS here

Free tier

If you signed up for AWS Free Tier prior to July 15, 2025, you can continue to use RDS for free for up to 12 months on select single-AZ instance databases with up to 750 hours per month. Your usage is aggregated across instance types if using more than one instance. (Available engines: MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server – SQLServer Express Edition only.) You also receive 20 GB of General Purpose SSD storage (gp2) per month and 20 GB ofautomated database backup storage per month for 1 year.

If you sign up for AWS Free Tier after July 15, 2025, you can choose between a Free Plan or a Paid Plan for accessto RDS. Either plan will offer $100 in credits and up to an additional $100 in credits for activating foundational AWS services. Free Tier credits are valid for up to 12 months. Additional details are explained in the "Explore AWS" widget in the AWS Management Console.

The AWS Free Tier applies to participating services across our global Regions. Free Tier credits are not available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions or the China (Beijing) Region at this time.

Instance type

Amazon RDS On-Demand Instances

With On-Demand Instances, you pay for compute capacity per hour your DB instance runs. With on-demand, there are no long-term commitments. As a result, you’re freed from the complexity and costs of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware. This transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into smaller variable costs.

On-Demand Instances are recommended for:

  • Users that prefer low cost and flexibility without any upfront payment or long-term commitment
  • Applications with short-term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted
  • Applications being developed or tested on Amazon RDS for the first time

Learn more about Amazon RDS On-Demand Instances

Click here for pricing on Amazon RDS On-Demand Instances

Amazon RDS Reserved Instances

With Reserved Instances, you can reserve a DB instance for a one- or three-year term. Reserved Instances receive a significant discount compared to On-Demand Instances. Amazon RDS provides three Reserved Instance payment options - No Upfront, Partial Upfront, All Upfront - enabling you to balance the amount you pay upfront with your effective hourly price.    

Reserved Instances are recommended for:

  • Users with long-term, steady state workloads
  • Mission critical applications that run on Multi-AZ database deployments for high availability and data durability
  • You can save up to 69% when you use Reserved Instances over on-demand rates when used in steady state

Learn more about Amazon RDS Reserved Instances

Click here for pricing on Amazon RDS Reserved Instances

Storage options

General Purpose (SSD) storage

With General Purpose solid state drive (SSD) storage, you can select from 20 GiB to 64 TiB of associated General Purpose (SSD) storage capacity for your primary data set.

General Purpose (SSD) storage provides a cost-effective solution for:

  • A broad range of database workloads that run on medium-sized DB instances

  • Development and test workloads

  • Workloads that aren’t latency sensitive

Learn more

Provisioned IOPS (SSD) storage

Provisioned input/output operations per second (IOPS) volumes allow you to scale from 1000 IOPS - 256,000 IOPS and 100 GiB to 64 TiB of storage. You will be charged for the IOPS and storage you provision. Note that maximum realized IOPS will vary by database workload.

Provisioned IOPS are recommended for:

  • Your most I/O intensive workloads

  • Database workloads that require low I/O latency

  • Database workloads that require consistent I/O throughput

Learn more

Pricing by Amazon RDS deployments

Customers have a number of deployment options for Amazon RDS including on-premises environments using Amazon RDS on Outposts, using Amazon RDS Custom for privileged access to underlying database for applications like Oracle E-Business Suite, or running Amazon RDS Proxy to make applications more scalable, resilient, and secure.

Amazon RDS Extended Support costs

Amazon RDS Extended Support allows you to continue use MySQL and PostgreSQL major versions after the community end-of-life. During this time, AWS provides fixes for critical security issues and bugs through patch releases, giving you more time, up to three years, to upgrade to a new major version to help you meet your business requirements.

For provisioned instances on Amazon Aurora, RDS for MySQL, and RDS for PostgreSQL, RDS Extended Support is priced per vCPU per hour. For Aurora Serverless v2, RDS Extended Support is priced per Aurora Capacity Unit (ACU) per hour consumed by your database. RDS Extended Support pricing is also dependent on the calendar date. 

To learn more about RDS Extended Support costs, see the Aurora, RDS for MySQL, and/or RDS for PostgreSQL pricing pages. 

Data transfer costs

For more detailed information on Data Transfer pricing, please go to your preferred Amazon RDS engine pricing page.

  • Data transferred between Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2 instances in the same Availability Zone

    Free. 

  • Data transferred between Availability Zones for replication of Multi-AZ deployments 

    Free.

  • Amazon RDS DB instances inside VPC

    When data transfers between an Amazon EC2 instance and an Amazon RDS database instance in different Availability Zones of the same Region, data transfer charges will apply. These data transfer charges follow the standard EC2 regional data transfer charges ($0.01 per GB in/out) for data transferred in and out of the Amazon EC2 instance. There is no additional charge for data transferred in and out of the Amazon RDS database instance.

  • DB snapshot copies across Regions

    DB snapshot copy is charged for the data transferred to copy the snapshot data across Regions. When the snapshot is copied, standard Amazon RDS database snapshot charges will apply to store it in the destination Region.

  • Cross-Region automated backups

    Cross-Region automated backups are charged for the data transferred to copy the Amazon RDS DB snapshot and DB transaction logs across Regions. When the snapshot is copied, standard database snapshot charges will apply to store it in the destination Region. There is no additional charge for storage of the DB transaction logs.

  • Amazon RDS Free Tier

    If you signed up for AWS Free Tier prior to July 15, 2025, you can continue to use RDS for free for up to 12 months on select single-AZ instance databases with up to 750 hours per month. Your usage is aggregated across instance types if using more than one instance. (Available engines: MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server – SQLServer Express Edition only.) You also receive 20 GB of General Purpose SSD storage (gp2) per month and 20 GB ofautomated database backup storage per month for 1 year.

    If you sign up for AWS Free Tier after July 15, 2025, you can choose between a Free Plan or a Paid Plan for accessto RDS. Either plan will offer $100 in credits and up to an additional $100 in credits for activating foundational AWS services. Free Tier credits are valid for up to 12 months. Additional details are explained in the "Explore AWS" widget in the AWS Management Console.

    The AWS Free Tier applies to participating services across our global Regions. Free Tier credits are not available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions or the China (Beijing) Region at this time.

  • Data transfer across other AWS services

    Rate tiers take into account your aggregate data transfer out usage across EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon RDS, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon VPC.

Public IPv4 costs

You will incur standard public IPv4 address charges associated with a resource launched in an Amazon VPC. Please read public IPv4 address pricing information for additional details.

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FAQs

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Amazon RDS is free to try. You only pay for what you use with no minimum or set up fees. Amazon RDS costs will vary based on customer needs. To help estimate costs and view your options, use the free AWS Pricing Calculator.

If you signed up for AWS Free Tier prior to July 15, 2025, you can continue to use RDS for free for up to 12 months on select single-AZ instance databases with up to 750 hours per month. Your usage is aggregated across instance types if using more than one instance. (Available engines: MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server – SQLServer Express Edition only.) You also receive 20 GB of General Purpose SSD storage (gp2) per month and 20 GB ofautomated database backup storage per month for 1 year.

If you sign up for AWS Free Tier after July 15, 2025, you can choose between a Free Plan or a Paid Plan for accessto RDS. Either plan will offer $100 in credits and up to an additional $100 in credits for activating foundational AWS services. Free Tier credits are valid for up to 12 months. Additional details are explained in the "Explore AWS" widget in the AWS Management Console.

The AWS Free Tier applies to participating services across our global Regions. Free Tier credits are not available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions or the China (Beijing) Region at this time.

You are billed at standard Amazon RDS prices for instance hours beyond what the Amazon RDS Free Tier provides.

Monthly costs are based on location or database engine of interest as well as the following components:

  • DB instance hours – Based on the type (e.g. db.t3.micro, db.m4.large) of the DB instance consumed. Following a billable status change, such as creating, starting, or modifying your DB instance type, you will be billed based on partial DB instance hours. Partial DB instance hours consumed are billed in one-second increments with a 10-minute minimum. For additional details, read our what's new announcement.

  • Storage (per GB per month) – Storage capacity you have provisioned to your DB instance. If you scale your provisioned storage capacity within the month, your bill will be pro-rated.

  • I/O requests per month – Total number of storage I/O requests (for Amazon RDS magnetic storage and Amazon Aurora only).

  • Provisioned IOPS per month – Provisioned IOPS rate, regardless of IOPS consumed (for Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS storage only).

  • Backup Storage – The storage associated with your automated database backups and any customer-initiated database snapshots. Increasing your backup retention period or taking additional database snapshots increases the backup storage consumed by your database.

  • Data transfer – Internet data transfer in and out of your DB instance.

Calculate what your monthly costs would be with the AWS Pricing Calculator.

Billing commences for a DB instance as soon as the DB instance is available and is billed for each hour it is running in an available state. Billing continues until the DB instance terminates, which would occur when upon deletion or in the event of an instance failure. Partial DB instance hours consumed are billed in one-second increments with a 10-minute minimum charge (following a billable status change, such as creating, starting, or modifying the DB instance type).

To stop all Amazon RDS related charges for an account, you need to delete all your Amazon RDS DB instances and snapshots. By only stopping an Amazon RDS DB instance, you stop billing for additional instance hours, but you will still incur storage costs.

While your database instance is stopped, you are charged for provisioned storage (including Provisioned IOPS) and backup storage (including manual snapshots and automated backups within your specified retention window), but not for DB instance hours.

There are multiple ways to reduce your Amazon RDS costs, including rightsizing your databases for your needs. With features like Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 and auto-scaling, you do not need to over-provision to ensure high availability. For additional cost savings, you can opt for Reserved Instances, which lets you reserve a database instance for a one- or three- year term at a significant discount compared to On-Demand Instance pricing.

Unless otherwise noted, our prices are exclusive of applicable taxes and duties, including VAT and applicable sales tax. For customers with a Japanese billing address, the use of AWS services is subject to Japanese Consumption Tax.

You can purchase a Reserved Instance in the Reserved Instance section of the AWS Management Console for Amazon RDS. Alternatively, you can use the Amazon RDS API or the AWS Command Line Interface to list the reservations available for purchase and then purchase a DB instance reservation.

Once you have made a reserved purchase, using a Reserved Instance is no different than an on-demand DB instance. Launch a DB instance using the same instance type, engine, and region for which you made the reservation. As long as your reservation purchase is active, Amazon RDS will apply the reduced hourly rate for which you are eligible to the new DB instance.

You can purchase up to 40 Reserved Instances. If you wish to run more than 40 DB instances, please complete the Amazon RDS DB Instance request form.

The Amazon RDS operations for creating, modifying, and deleting DB instances do not distinguish between On-Demand and Reserved Instances (RIs). Our system will automatically apply your reservation(s) such that all eligible DB instances are charged at the lower hourly reserved DB instance rate.

When you purchase an RI under the All-Upfront payment option, you pay for the entire term of the RI in one upfront payment. You can also choose to pay nothing upfront by choosing the No Upfront option. The entire value of the No Upfront RI is spread across every hour in the term and you will be billed for every hour in the term, regardless of usage. The Partial Upfront payment option is a hybrid of the All Upfront and No Upfront options. You make a small upfront payment, and you are billed a low hourly rate for every hour in the term regardless of usage.