AWS EKS Pricing Per Cluster: How to Calculate Your Total Bill

When your boss asks, “How much will this new Kubernetes cluster cost?”, do not say “73 dollars.” That is only the control plane. The real cost is usually 10x that.

The 2025 EKS Cluster Pricing Formula

Total Cost = Control Plane + Worker Nodes + Networking + Observability.

1. Control Plane (Fixed)

• $0.10/hour ($73/month).
• Non-negotiable unless you use EKS Anywhere (customer managed).

2. Worker Nodes (Variable)

• Minimum recommendation for Production: 2x m5.large (2 vCPU, 8GB RAM).
• Cost: 2 * $0.096/hr * 730 hours = ~$140/month.

3. Networking (The Multiplier)

• NAT Gateways: 3 Availability Zones = ~$98/month.
• Load Balancer (ALB): 1 Ingress Controller = ~$22/month.

4. Storage & Observability

• EBS Volumes: 100GB GP3 = ~$8/month.
• CloudWatch Logs: Control Plane Logging = ~$10/month (depends on verbosity).

The Total “Base” Cost

For a standard, HA production cluster with zero traffic:

$73 + $140 + $98 + $22 + $18 = ~$351 per month.

This is your baseline. If you run 10 clusters, that is $3,500/month in “idle” infrastructure.

[!NOTE] Want a precise estimate? Plug your specific instance types and node count into our AWS EKS Pricing Calculator.