.png)
S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the cheapest cloud storage at any major provider. At $0.00099/GB-month, storing 1 petabyte costs $1,013/month. The same petabyte in S3 Standard costs $23,552/month. That 96% cost gap is compelling — and it is real — but it comes with retrieval costs and minimum duration rules that make Glacier the wrong choice for any data you might actually need back quickly.
This guide covers every rate across all Glacier tiers and how they compare to Standard and Standard-IA, the retrieval cost math that determines whether Glacier saves or costs more, the minimum storage duration trap, and the lifecycle rules that automate migration correctly.
See exactly what you’re overpaying in under 60 seconds. Try the Calculator for free →
Complete S3 Storage Class Pricing Table (US East, May 2026)
| Storage Class | Storage/GB-month | Retrieval fee | Retrieval time | Min duration | Min object | Best for |
| S3 Standard | $0.023 | None | Milliseconds | None | None | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | $0.0125 | $0.01/GB | Milliseconds | 30 days | 128 KB | Monthly access |
| S3 One Zone-IA | $0.01 | $0.01/GB | Milliseconds | 30 days | 128 KB | Reproducible, monthly access |
| Glacier Instant Retrieval | $0.004 | $0.03/GB | Milliseconds | 90 days | 128 KB | Quarterly access, instant needed |
| Glacier Flexible Retrieval | $0.0036 | Bulk: free / Std: $0.01/GB / Exp: $0.03/GB | 5-12hr / 3-5hr / 1-5min | 90 days | 40 KB overhead | Annual access, delay OK |
| Glacier Deep Archive | $0.00099 | Std: $0.02/GB / Bulk: $0.0025/GB | Standard: 12hr / Bulk: 48hr | 180 days | 40 KB overhead | 7+ yr compliance, rarely retrieved |
Price table at top per publishing spec. All US East (N. Virginia). Verify at aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing — rates change.
Sources: AWS official pricing page (aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing), nubbo.app (AWS API data 2026-05-12), cloudburn.io (April 2026), amnic.com, LeanOps (April 2026). All US East (N. Virginia). Other regions vary by 5-30%. Verify before estimating.
Glacier Deep Archive: $1 per TB Storage, but Retrieval Is Not Free
Deep Archive is the correct choice for data that must be retained for 7-10 years and is virtually certain never to be retrieved. Regulatory archives, legal holds, HIPAA records, SEC compliance data, and audit trails that must exist but will almost never be read are the canonical use cases.
The storage cost is negligible: 100 TB at $0.00099/GB = $99/month versus $2,250/month in Standard. That $2,151/month saving is real and compounds to $25,812/year. The trap is retrieval. Standard retrieval from Deep Archive costs $0.02/GB and takes up to 12 hours. Restoring 1 TB: $20.48. Restoring 10 TB: $204.80. Restoring 100 TB: $2,048 — nearly erasing one month of storage savings in a single restore. Source: amnic.com citing AWS official rates, May 2026.
Bulk retrieval is much cheaper at $0.0025/GB, but takes up to 48 hours. For planned, non-urgent restores of compliance data, bulk is the correct option. Bulk restoring 10 TB costs $25.60 versus $204.80 standard — an 8x difference. Always use bulk retrieval for Deep Archive unless there is a genuine urgency requiring 12-hour standard retrieval. Source: amnic.com, May 2026.
The 180-day minimum trap: S3 Deep Archive charges for a minimum of 180 days regardless of when an object is deleted. An object uploaded on day 1 and deleted on day 30 still generates 180 days of storage charges. For data with uncertain retention periods — draft files, temporary archives, logs not yet confirmed for long-term retention — Deep Archive creates billing exposure. Only migrate data to Deep Archive when the 180-day minimum is certain.
Also read: Compute Savings Plans: reduce the compute side of your AWS bill
Glacier Instant Retrieval: When You Need Archive Pricing With Instant Access
Glacier Instant Retrieval costs $0.004/GB-month — 83% cheaper than Standard — with millisecond retrieval. There is no waiting, no restore job, no delay. Objects in Glacier Instant Retrieval are retrieved on GET just like S3 Standard or Standard-IA.
The trade-offs versus Standard-IA: Glacier Instant Retrieval has a 90-day minimum storage duration (versus 30 days for Standard-IA) and a higher retrieval fee ($0.03/GB versus $0.01/GB). For data accessed once per month or more, Standard-IA is cheaper overall because of the lower retrieval fee. For data accessed quarterly — once every 3 months or less — Glacier Instant Retrieval’s 83% lower storage rate more than offsets the higher retrieval fee. The breakeven access frequency is approximately once every 5-6 weeks.
Medical imaging archives accessed for patient care, news media assets retrieved occasionally for retrospectives, genomics datasets queried quarterly, and compliance documents needing instant access for unexpected audits are the best fits. The requirement is instant retrieval when needed — but ‘needed’ is rare.
Glacier Flexible Retrieval: When You Can Wait and Bulk Is Free
Glacier Flexible Retrieval costs $0.0036/GB-month with a key advantage over the other tiers: bulk retrieval is completely free. You pay nothing to restore data if you can wait 5-12 hours for a bulk restore job. Standard retrieval (3-5 hours) costs $0.01/GB. Expedited retrieval (1-5 minutes) costs $0.03/GB.
This makes Glacier Flexible Retrieval effectively the cheapest option for data you might retrieve once a year in a planned, non-urgent restore — annual compliance reviews, DR drills, year-end financial archive exports. Budget the restore window for a bulk retrieval and the retrieval cost is zero. Only the 90-day minimum storage duration and the $0.05/1,000 transition request fee apply.
For disaster recovery archives where a restore might be needed urgently (database corruption, ransomware, catastrophic failure), Glacier Flexible Retrieval’s hours-long standard restore time is a risk. DR archives requiring fast recovery should use Glacier Instant Retrieval or Standard-IA. Glacier Flexible Retrieval suits archives where the recovery time objective (RTO) is measured in hours, not minutes.
The Small-Object Problem: Metadata Overhead and Lifecycle Costs
Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Deep Archive both charge 40 KB of metadata overhead per object — 8 KB billed at Standard rates ($0.023/GB-month) plus 32 KB billed at the archive class rate. For objects larger than a few hundred KB, this overhead is negligible. For workloads with millions of small objects (logs, thumbnails, individual sensor readings), the metadata overhead can exceed the actual storage cost.
A bucket with 10 million 5 KB objects migrated to Glacier Deep Archive: actual data storage = 10M x 5 KB = ~47.7 GB at $0.00099 = $0.05/month. Metadata overhead = 10M x 40 KB = ~381 GB, with 95.3 GB at Standard rates ($2.19/month) and the remaining 286 GB at Deep Archive rates ($0.28/month). Total metadata overhead: $2.47/month against $0.05/month of actual data storage. The metadata costs 49x more than the data.
AWS changed the default lifecycle behavior in September 2024: objects under 128 KB are not automatically transitioned by lifecycle rules. This prevents the small-object trap by default. If your bucket contains millions of small objects, manual lifecycle configuration or Intelligent-Tiering is more appropriate than Glacier.
Lifecycle transition cost: moving objects to Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Deep Archive costs $0.05 per 1,000 requests. For a bucket with 100 million objects, one lifecycle transition run costs $5,000 in transition request fees. This one-time charge is often larger than the first month of storage savings for large buckets. Calculate the transition cost before triggering a mass lifecycle migration.
When Intelligent-Tiering Beats Manual Glacier Management
S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitors access patterns and automatically moves objects between Frequent Access ($0.023/GB), Infrequent Access ($0.0125/GB), Archive Instant Access ($0.004/GB), and Archive Access ($0.0036/GB) tiers. The monitoring fee is $0.0025 per 1,000 objects per month. There are no retrieval fees.
For any data where access patterns are unpredictable or unknown, Intelligent-Tiering eliminates the retrieval fee risk of manually managed Glacier classes. If a compliance archive unexpectedly needs retrieval, objects in Intelligent-Tiering serve immediately at no retrieval charge. Objects in manually managed Glacier Deep Archive charge $0.02/GB for the same retrieval.
The trade-off: Intelligent-Tiering with Archive Access ($0.004/GB at the deepest tier) is more expensive per GB than Glacier Flexible Retrieval ($0.0036/GB) or Deep Archive ($0.00099/GB) when retrieval is predictably rare. For genuinely never-retrieved compliance data with a known 7-year retention requirement, manually placing data in Deep Archive is cheaper than Intelligent-Tiering. For data where ‘maybe once a year’ is the access pattern, Intelligent-Tiering eliminates retrieval fee surprise at a modest storage premium.
The Retrieval Break-Even Analysis: When Glacier Stops Saving
The question every team should answer before migrating data to Glacier is: how often will this data be retrieved, and at what volume? The answer determines whether Glacier actually saves money or costs more than staying in Standard.
Break-even for Glacier Deep Archive versus Standard: at $0.00099/GB storage saving $0.02223/GB-month versus Standard, and $0.02/GB retrieval cost per access, one full retrieval of a dataset recovers approximately 1.1 months of storage savings. A 1 TB dataset saves $22.75/month in storage (Standard minus Deep Archive). One full 1 TB retrieval at standard rates costs $20.48. Net saving after one retrieval: $2.27 in the first month. If retrievals happen monthly, Deep Archive provides almost no saving over Standard. If retrievals happen once every 5 years, Deep Archive saves $1,358 over the 5-year period minus the one retrieval cost of $20.48.
Break-even for Glacier Flexible Retrieval versus Standard-IA: Glacier Flexible Retrieval costs $0.0036/GB versus Standard-IA at $0.0125/GB — $0.0089/GB-month saving. One bulk retrieval is free. One standard retrieval costs $0.01/GB. Standard retrieval break-even: 0.89 standard retrievals per month before Glacier Flexible loses its storage advantage. Translation: if you retrieve data more than once per month using standard (not bulk) retrieval, Standard-IA is cheaper overall.
Start your free AWS storage cost analysis with Usage.ai
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How much does S3 Glacier Deep Archive cost?
S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs $0.00099/GB-month in US East (N. Virginia) — approximately $1.01 per TB per month. It is the cheapest cloud storage available from any major provider. At 100 TB, monthly storage cost is $99 versus $2,250 for S3 Standard. Retrieval costs extra: Standard retrieval is $0.02/GB (12-hour wait), Bulk retrieval is $0.0025/GB (48-hour wait). A 180-day minimum storage duration applies.
2. What is the difference between S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval and Glacier Flexible Retrieval?
Glacier Instant Retrieval costs $0.004/GB-month and retrieves objects in milliseconds with no restore job required — identical access speed to S3 Standard. Retrieval fee: $0.03/GB. Glacier Flexible Retrieval costs $0.0036/GB-month but requires a restore job: Bulk retrieval is free at 5-12 hours, Standard retrieval is $0.01/GB at 3-5 hours, Expedited is $0.03/GB at 1-5 minutes. Use Instant when you need archive pricing with instant access. Use Flexible when you can plan restores in advance and want free bulk retrieval.
3. What is the minimum storage duration for Glacier?
Glacier Instant Retrieval: 90-day minimum. Glacier Flexible Retrieval: 90-day minimum. Glacier Deep Archive: 180-day minimum. If an object is deleted before the minimum duration expires, AWS charges for the remaining minimum period. S3 Standard-IA and One Zone-IA have 30-day minimums. S3 Standard has no minimum duration.
4. Is Glacier Deep Archive free to retrieve?
No. Glacier Deep Archive charges $0.02/GB for Standard retrieval (12 hours) or $0.0025/GB for Bulk retrieval (48 hours). Restoring 1 TB via Standard costs $20.48. Restoring 1 TB via Bulk costs $2.56. For planned, non-urgent restores, always use Bulk retrieval. Unlike Glacier Flexible Retrieval (where Bulk is free), Deep Archive charges for all retrieval modes.
5. When should I use Glacier Deep Archive vs Glacier Flexible Retrieval?
Use Deep Archive when: data must be retained for 7 or more years, retrieval is expected to never happen or happen at most once in several years, 48-hour bulk restore time is acceptable, and the 180-day minimum duration commitment is certain. Use Glacier Flexible Retrieval when: retrieval may happen once or twice per year, you can plan the restore window, and free bulk retrieval at 5-12 hours is sufficient. Glacier Flexible Retrieval’s 90-day minimum (versus 180 days) is also less risky for data with uncertain long-term retention.
6. Does the 40 KB metadata overhead affect my bill?
Yes, for small objects. Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Deep Archive charge 40 KB of metadata overhead per object regardless of the object’s actual size. For objects under 100 KB, the metadata overhead can exceed the data storage cost. AWS does not transition objects under 128 KB via lifecycle rules by default (September 2024 change). For buckets with millions of small objects, Glacier classes are not cost-effective — use Intelligent-Tiering or Standard-IA instead.
7. What are the lifecycle transition costs to Glacier?
Transitioning objects to Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Deep Archive costs $0.05 per 1,000 requests. For a bucket with 100 million objects, one lifecycle transition run costs $5,000 in transition fees alone. This is a one-time charge but is often larger than the first month of storage savings for large object counts. Calculate transition cost before triggering mass lifecycle migrations. Objects under 128 KB are not transitioned by lifecycle rules by default.
