AWS costs: AWS Backup pricing - and restore charges

AWS Backup charges you for four separate things, not one: backup storage (billed monthly per GB), the data you restore (billed separately, per GB), cross-Region transfers, and a handful of optional add-ons like restore testing and backup search. The counterintuitive part: restoring some of that data costs nothing extra at all — AWS Backup's own pricing documentation prices a full EBS snapshot restore at $0.00 — while restoring the exact same amount of data from an EFS or S3 backup bills you per GB, every single time, on top of what you already paid to store it.

What AWS Backup actually bills you for

AWS Backup is a centralized backup service. It sits on top of the backup mechanisms that Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EFS, Amazon S3 and other services already have, and it gives you one place to schedule, monitor, and restore all of it. Charges for that activity — storage, data transfers, restores, and early deletion — appear under a single "Backup" line in your AWS bill instead of showing up separately under each resource type.

There are six components you can actually be billed for:

The first two — storage and restore — are the ones that show up on almost every bill. The rest are opt-in. This post walks through all six, in the order they're most likely to surprise you.

Backup storage pricing: warm vs. cold

AWS Backup storage pricing is based on the amount of storage space your backup data consumes, billed in GB-Month. The storage amount billed in a month is based on the average storage space used throughout that month — not a snapshot taken on the last day of the billing cycle. That distinction matters if your backup footprint grows or shrinks mid-month, because you're charged for the average, not the peak or the final number.

For Amazon EFS and Amazon S3 backups, AWS Backup's own pricing examples put warm storage in US East (N. Virginia) at $0.05 per GB-Month. If you store 400 GB of EFS backups for 15 days of the month and 800 GB for the other 15, that's 18,000 GB-Days, divided by 30 to get 600 GB-Month, times $0.05 — a $30 monthly storage charge for that resource alone.

GB-Day billing vs. GB-hour billing — why it matters

Backups of EFS, S3, VMware, SAP HANA on EC2, and Amazon Timestream are billed on a GB-day basis instead of a GB-hour basis. In practice this means storage for those resource types is billed for the whole day, even if the backup only existed for part of it — so deleting a backup at 11pm doesn't save you anything on that day's charge. Resources billed on a GB-hour basis are more forgiving about partial-day deletions.

Cold storage: cheaper to hold, expensive if you leave early

Cold storage is currently only supported for backups of Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Timestream, SAP HANA on EC2, and VMware Backup. Cold storage for DynamoDB is only available if you've opted in to DynamoDB's advanced features. Not every resource type gets a cold tier — RDS and S3 backups, for instance, don't have one.

The trade-off with cold storage is retention: backups transitioned to cold storage must be retained for a minimum of 90 days. Delete them before that window closes, and you're charged a pro-rated fee equal to the storage charge for the remaining days — you pay for the retention period whether you keep the data around or not.

How storage billing differs by resource type

This is the part of AWS Backup pricing that trips people up most, and it's not well advertised: not every resource type is billed the same way, because not every resource type has "full AWS Backup management."

When a resource type supports full AWS Backup management, charges for that activity — storage, transfers, restores, early deletion — appear in the "Backup" section of your AWS bill. Amazon EFS, Amazon S3, VMware Backup, and Amazon EKS cluster backups fall into this category, and they're billed at the rates shown on AWS Backup's own pricing page.

When a resource type does not support full AWS Backup management, some of your AWS Backup activity — notably storage costs — has billing reflected by the respective AWS service instead. Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS backups work this way: there's no additional charge to use AWS Backup's centralized features on top of them, beyond the existing backup storage pricing already charged by the underlying service, such as Amazon EBS snapshot storage fees. The same applies to Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB — you continue to pay what you'd already pay for snapshot storage and restore costs on those services, billed by those services, not by AWS Backup at a separate flat rate.

What that means practically: if you want the exact GB-Month rate for RDS backup storage, don't look at AWS Backup's pricing page — look at Amazon RDS's own pricing page, because that's whose meter is actually running. Same for DynamoDB and its own pricing page. AWS Backup is the console you manage them from; the underlying service is who bills you.

Restore pricing: the charge everyone forgets to budget for

The restore amount billed in a month is based on the total amount of data restored across every restore performed that month, measured in GB. It's tracked separately from storage, and it resets each month — so if you restore 50 GB in January and nothing in February, you're only billed for January's 50 GB.

For services with full AWS Backup management, the published example rates are specific: restoring Amazon EFS data from warm storage costs $0.02 per GB, and restoring from cold storage costs $0.03 per GB — cold is more expensive to pull data back from, even though it's cheaper to store. Amazon S3 restores through AWS Backup are also billed at $0.02 per GB, based on AWS Backup's own worked pricing example.

So a straightforward restore of 10 GB from EFS warm storage costs $0.20. Restore 2.5 TB (2,500 GB) of S3 backup data, and that's $50 — separate from whatever you're already paying to store it.

Item-level restore: a different, sneakier fee

If you only need to pull back a handful of files rather than the whole backup, AWS Backup supports item-level restore for some resource types. This is billed differently: you're charged both the standard per-GB restore rate and a per-request fee. In AWS Backup's own example, restoring 10 files of 100 MB each, split across two separate restore requests, works out to 1 GB of data at $0.02/GB ($0.02) plus 2 requests at $0.50 each ($1.00) — a total of $1.02 for what is, in raw data terms, barely more than a rounding error.

The lesson there isn't subtle: item-level restore is convenient when you genuinely need a handful of files, but if you're going to restore most of a backup anyway, batching it into fewer requests — or doing a full restore instead — usually costs less than several small item-level pulls.

Which restores are actually free

This is the counterintuitive part, and it follows directly from the split described above. Because Amazon EBS restores through AWS Backup are billed through EBS's own mechanisms rather than a separate AWS Backup restore fee, AWS Backup's own restore testing example treats restored EBS snapshot storage as a $0.00 charge — described plainly as "this is free" in the pricing documentation. You still pay to store the resulting volume once it exists, but the act of restoring an EBS snapshot doesn't carry its own AWS Backup restore-per-GB line item the way EFS or S3 restores do.

The same underlying-service billing pattern applies to RDS and DynamoDB restores: they run through their own service's restore mechanisms, not a flat AWS-Backup-wide restore rate. If you want to know exactly what an RDS restore will cost you, that number lives on the RDS pricing page, not the AWS Backup one.

Cross-Region data transfer and copy costs

If your backup plan copies data to a second AWS Region for disaster recovery — a common setup for anyone taking business continuity seriously — you pay for that copy in two separate ways: the transfer itself, and storage in the destination Region.

The cross-Region amount billed in a month is the amount of data transferred between two Regions, whether that's within a single AWS account or across two accounts. You only incur the charge when data actually leaves a Region; transfers within the same Region are free. The account doing the sending is billed for the transfer; the account receiving the data is billed for the storage it creates there.

AWS Backup's own worked example makes the split concrete: copying 400 GB of EFS backups from US East (N. Virginia) to US West (N. California) costs $16 in cross-Region transfer (at $0.04/GB for that resource group), plus a separate $12 for 200 GB-Month of storage in the destination Region (at $0.06/GB-Month there) — a combined $28 just to have a second copy sitting in another Region, on top of whatever it costs to store the original.

Rates differ by resource type. AWS groups resources for cross-Region pricing purposes: EFS, DynamoDB, Timestream, and VMware Backup sit in one group; S3, Aurora DSQL, and EKS in another; EBS, FSx, Storage Gateway, DocumentDB, Neptune, Aurora, and RDS in a third. Each group has its own transfer rate, so a blanket "$0.04/GB" assumption across every resource type will be wrong for some of them.

Logically air-gapped vaults cost more to store in

If you're copying backups into a logically air-gapped vault — the isolated-recovery-environment option AWS Backup offers for protection against ransomware or account compromise — storage in that destination vault is billed at a different, higher rate than a standard backup vault in the same Region. AWS Backup's own example shows EBS and EFS backups stored in a logically air-gapped vault in EU West (Ireland) billed at $0.0575 per GB-Month, versus $0.05 per GB-Month for the same data in a standard warm-storage vault. All billed charges for storage in logically air-gapped vaults show under the "Backup" service specifically, and note that the backup storage free tiers available for EBS, DocumentDB, and Neptune don't apply when the storage sits in a logically air-gapped vault.

Restore testing pricing

Restore testing is AWS Backup's feature for automatically restoring recovery points on a schedule, so you can confirm your backups are actually recoverable without waiting for an emergency to find out. It's opt-in, and it has its own pricing separate from a manual restore.

Restore testing pricing has two parts:

1. Restore testing evaluations — a charge incurred for each backup or recovery point successfully orchestrated through a restore testing plan.
2. Restore testing storage — billed at the same rate as a standard restore for that resource type, based on how much data was restored during the test.

AWS Backup's published example prices restore testing evaluations at $1.50 per recovery point tested. Test 10 EBS snapshots and 15 EFS recovery points in a month, and that's 25 evaluations at $1.50 each — $37.50 in evaluation charges alone, before counting the data itself. Because EBS restores carry no separate AWS Backup restore fee, the 640 GB of EBS snapshot data restored during that test costs $0.00 in storage charges; the 750 GB of EFS data restored from warm storage costs $15 at $0.02/GB. Total restore testing bill for that scenario: $52.50.

There are also secondary costs that depend on the resource type and how long the restored test resource is retained afterward. For S3, restored objects during testing generate PUT request charges on top of the restore itself. If an archived EBS snapshot gets restored during testing, AWS Backup temporarily restores it to the standard tier for one day by default, and you're billed for that one day of standard-tier storage.

Backup search pricing

Backup search lets you search across your backups for specific files or objects without restoring the whole recovery point first — useful if you need to find one deleted file across weeks of daily backups instead of guessing which day it disappeared. It requires opting in to create a backup index before you can search anything.

Pricing here is based on the number of objects or files scanned, plus index storage and the search itself:

• Index creation is billed at $0.20 per million files indexed.
• Index storage is billed at $0.02 per million items stored, per month.
• Searching indexed backups is billed at $0.07 per million items searched.

Backup index storage and backup search charges are the same across all resource types — this is one of the few places in AWS Backup pricing where the rate doesn't change depending on whether you're working with EBS, EFS, or something else. Any files you actually restore after a search are billed at that resource type's standard restore rate, the same as any other restore.

AWS Backup's own example: index 45,000 files across 10 EBS volumes with 30 daily backup indexes created (13.5 million files indexed total), and that's $2.70 in index creation plus $0.27 in monthly index storage — under $3 for the indexing itself. Searching across 7 of those snapshots (315,000 files searched) adds about two cents. It's a genuinely cheap feature relative to what it can save you in time hunting for one lost file.

Backup Audit Manager and malware protection pricing

AWS Backup Audit Manager checks your backup usage against compliance controls — for example, confirming that resources of a certain type are actually covered by a backup plan. It's priced on two components: backup evaluations, and configuration items recorded by AWS Config, which Audit Manager depends on to track backup activity.

Backup evaluations are prorated at $1.25 per 1,000 evaluations — $0.00125 each. Every time a backup evaluation runs, it also triggers one AWS Config configuration item, and additional configuration items get recorded whenever your underlying backup resources change, such as edits to a backup plan or the creation of a new recovery point. Those configuration items are billed separately, on your AWS Config bill, at AWS Config's own rate.

In AWS Backup's own example, 1,500 backup evaluations run across 2 Regions works out to 3,000 total evaluations at $0.00125 each — $3.75. If those evaluations and related resource changes trigger 2,000 configuration items at AWS Config's rate of $0.003 each, that's another $6, for a combined $9.75 in Audit Manager charges for the month, split across two separate bills.

Malware protection for AWS Backup uses Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection, and it's priced separately based on the total data scanned per month, measured in GB, summed across every scan performed. It's billed under GuardDuty's own pricing, not AWS Backup's.

What a real monthly bill looks like

Numbers in isolation don't tell you much. Here's how they stack in AWS Backup's own combined example — a single account running EFS backups with a cross-Region DR copy, some restores, and Audit Manager turned on:

Storage was less than half the final bill. Cross-Region transfer and destination storage together outweighed it, and that's before this account restored anything meaningful. Scale this up to a real production environment — dozens of file systems, a genuine disaster recovery exercise involving hundreds of gigabytes of restored data — and the restore and transfer lines are usually what push the bill past what the storage rate alone would suggest.

Where the bill quietly grows

A few patterns account for most of the "why is my Backup bill higher than I expected" moments:

S3 backups carry hidden API and event charges

Backing up S3 with AWS Backup isn't just a per-GB storage fee. You're also charged for GET and LIST API requests against your S3 objects, and for Amazon EventBridge events generated during the backup process. AWS Backup's own example for a 500 TB S3 bucket with 100 million objects shows $25,000 in storage charges alongside $320 in GET request charges, $1 in LIST request charges, and $20 in EventBridge charges — a smaller add-on in relative terms, but not zero, and it recurs with every incremental backup.

S3 objects under 128 KB are billed as if they were 128 KB

If your S3 bucket holds a lot of small files — log fragments, thumbnails, metadata objects — each one under 128 KB is billed as a full 128 KB backup regardless of its actual size. A bucket full of tiny objects can end up paying storage rates on far more data than actually exists.

EKS cluster backups carry a one-time creation fee per namespace

Backups of an EKS cluster incur a one-time backup creation fee charged per namespace backed up, on top of the ongoing storage charge for the cluster's state data. If your workload has persistent storage attached — EBS, S3, or EFS volumes — those incur standard AWS Backup storage charges as well, separate from the EKS-specific fee.

How to estimate and control your AWS Backup bill

Ethan is blunt about the step people skip first: "Everybody jumps to cold storage because $0.0125 sounds better than $0.05. Half of them delete the backup at day 40 and eat the early-deletion penalty anyway. Look at your own retention habits before you chase the cheaper number — the discount only exists if you actually leave it alone for 90 days."

1. Separate your storage estimate from your restore estimate. Storage recurs monthly regardless of activity; restore only bills when you actually pull data back. Don't fold a hypothetical disaster-recovery restore into your baseline monthly cost — model it separately.
2. Check whether your resource type bills through AWS Backup or through the underlying service. If you're running EBS, RDS, or DynamoDB, go check that service's own pricing page for the specific storage and restore rates that actually apply — AWS Backup's headline rates are for EFS, S3, and the other fully-managed resource types.
3. Only move to cold storage what you genuinely won't touch for 90 days. If there's any real chance you'll delete or restore from a given backup inside three months, the cold-storage discount isn't worth the early-deletion penalty risk.
4. Batch item-level restores instead of running them one file at a time. Each item-level restore request carries its own $0.50 charge on top of the per-GB rate — fewer, larger requests cost less than the same data pulled back in several small ones.
5. Use cost allocation tags to see which backup plan is actually driving the bill. Charges for AWS Backup activity appear under "Backup" in Cost Explorer, and cost allocation tags let you break that total down by project, team, or environment instead of staring at one lump sum.
6. Budget restore testing separately from ordinary restores. Each restore testing run bills a $1.50 evaluation fee per recovery point tested, every time it runs — a daily test across many recovery points adds up in a way a one-off manual restore never will.
7. If you're on S3, watch object size and API volume, not just total GB stored. A bucket of many small objects under 128 KB, or one that generates heavy GET/LIST/EventBridge activity during backup, can cost more than the raw storage number implies.

Common pricing mistakes

Assuming one flat rate applies everywhere is the biggest one, and it comes from treating AWS Backup as a single priced product instead of a management layer over several differently-billed services. A close second is assuming storage and restore move together — they don't, and a service that's cheap to store (like EBS through AWS Backup) can still surprise you elsewhere, just not on the restore line specifically. A third is forgetting that cross-Region copies bill twice: once for the transfer out, and again for storage in the destination Region, at that Region's own rate — which for a logically air-gapped vault is higher than a standard vault in the same Region.

Jake once asked for a single number: "Just tell me what percent of a typical Backup bill is storage versus everything else." Ethan wouldn't give him one. "There isn't a typical split. A quiet month, it's basically all storage. The month you actually need the data back, restore and item-level fees can outweigh storage completely. Anyone who quotes you a fixed ratio hasn't run a real recovery."

We can't tell you your exact monthly total without knowing your resource mix, retention settings, and Region — that number depends entirely on your account's specific usage, and nobody can responsibly quote it without seeing your actual backup plan.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free tier for AWS Backup?

Not a dedicated AWS Backup free tier in the way some services have one, but resources like Amazon EBS, DocumentDB, and Neptune have their own free-tier storage allowances that AWS Backup respects — except when that storage is held in a logically air-gapped vault, where the free tier doesn't apply.

Does AWS Backup charge extra just for using the service?

No. There's no minimum fee and no setup charge. For resources like EC2/EBS, RDS, and DynamoDB, there's no additional charge to use AWS Backup's centralized management beyond what you'd already pay for that service's own snapshot storage and restore costs.

Why is my restore bill higher than my storage bill some months?

Because restore and storage are billed independently. A month where you run a large disaster-recovery test or pull back a lot of data can easily produce a bigger restore charge than that month's storage line, especially if several of those restores were item-level requests carrying their own per-request fee.

Do EBS restores through AWS Backup really cost nothing?

AWS Backup's own restore testing pricing example treats restored EBS snapshot storage as a $0.00 charge, since EBS billing runs through the underlying EBS service rather than a separate AWS Backup restore-per-GB rate. You'll still pay for the storage of the volume you create from that restore, under standard EBS pricing.

What's the difference between warm and cold storage pricing?

Warm storage keeps backups immediately restorable and costs more; cold storage is cheaper to store but requires a minimum 90-day retention and, for resources like EFS, a higher per-GB restore rate ($0.03/GB from cold versus $0.02/GB from warm). Cold storage is only available for EBS, EFS, DynamoDB, Timestream, SAP HANA on EC2, and VMware Backup.

What happens if I delete a cold storage backup before 90 days?

You're still charged, pro-rated, for the storage cost of the remaining days in that 90-day window — deleting early doesn't reduce what you owe for that retention period.

How much does item-level restore cost compared to a full restore?

Item-level restore charges the standard per-GB restore rate for the resource type, plus a separate per-request fee of $0.50. In AWS Backup's own example, restoring 1 GB across two item-level requests cost $1.02 total — $0.02 in data charges and $1.00 in request fees, meaning the request fees dominated the bill for a small amount of data.

Does cross-Region backup copy cost the same for every resource type?

No. AWS groups resources into different pricing tiers for cross-Region transfer — EFS, DynamoDB, Timestream, and VMware Backup are one group; S3, Aurora DSQL, and EKS another; EBS, FSx, Storage Gateway, DocumentDB, Neptune, Aurora, and RDS Backup a third — and each group has its own rate.

Why does storing a backup in a logically air-gapped vault cost more?

Logically air-gapped vaults are isolated recovery environments designed to survive account compromise or ransomware, and AWS bills storage there at a higher rate than a standard backup vault in the same Region — in AWS Backup's own example, $0.0575/GB-Month versus $0.05/GB-Month for the same data.

Is restore testing the same thing as a manual restore, cost-wise?

No. Restore testing adds a per-recovery-point evaluation charge of $1.50 on top of the standard restore rate for the data involved, and it's billed every time the test runs, not just once. A manual, one-off restore only carries the standard restore rate.

Do I need to opt in to anything before I can search my backups?

Yes. Backup search requires you to create a backup index first, which has its own charge of $0.20 per million files indexed, before you can search across those backups at $0.07 per million items searched.

Are backup search rates different for different resource types?

No — backup index storage and backup search charges are the same across all resource types. Only the restore charges for anything you actually pull back after a search vary by resource type, at each resource's standard restore rate.

What does AWS Backup Audit Manager actually cost?

Two separate charges: backup evaluations at $1.25 per 1,000 evaluations, and AWS Config configuration items, billed separately on your Config bill, generated whenever a backup evaluation runs or an underlying backup resource changes.

Where do I find the exact restore rate for RDS or DynamoDB?

Not on AWS Backup's pricing page — those resource types are billed through their own service's snapshot and restore pricing rather than a separate AWS Backup rate. Check the RDS or DynamoDB pricing pages directly for the numbers that apply to your Region.

Why did my S3 backup bill include GET and LIST request charges I didn't expect?

Backing up S3 with AWS Backup generates API requests against your bucket during the backup process, and those GET/LIST requests are billed separately from the storage charge, along with any EventBridge events the backup process triggers.

Can I see exactly which backup plan is costing the most?

Yes — AWS Backup charges appear under "Backup" in Cost Explorer, and you can use cost allocation tags on your backup resources to break that total down by tag rather than looking at one combined figure.

Revision note. Written September 2026, covering AWS Backup's storage, restore, cross-Region, restore testing, backup search, and Audit Manager pricing as published on AWS's own pricing and documentation pages at time of writing. AWS revises its rates and adds new resource types periodically, so double-check the current figures on AWS's pricing page before budgeting a large migration. If a surprise line item sent you looking for this in the first place — we've been there, and it's a genuinely confusing bill to untangle on your own.Happy learning..