AWS NAT Gateway Pricing in 2025: A Complete Breakdown

AWS NAT Gateway is one of the most common sources of “bill shock.” You turn it on for security (private subnets need internet access), and at the end of the month, you see a line item that rivals your EC2 spend.

In this guide, we break down exactly how pricing works in 2025 and how to estimate it.

The Two Components of the Bill

AWS charges for NAT Gateways in two ways. You pay for existence and you pay for usage.

1. Hourly Charge (The “Existence” Fee)

You pay for every hour the NAT Gateway is provisioned and available.

• Rate: ~$0.045 per hour (varies slightly by region).
• Monthly Cost: $0.045 * 730 hours = ~$32.85 per gateway.

If you follow AWS best practices and put a NAT Gateway in 3 Availability Zones (AZs) for high availability, you are paying $98.55/month just to have them idle.

2. Data Processing Charge (The “Usage” Fee)

You pay for every Gigabyte (GB) of data that passes through the gateway. This includes both request bytes (outbound) and response bytes (inbound).

• Rate: ~$0.045 per GB processed.
• Example: If you download 1TB (1000 GB) of data through your NAT, that costs $45.00.

[!IMPORTANT] This “Data Processing” fee is separate from standard Data Transfer fees. You might pay for Data Transfer Out to the internet plus the NAT Gateway processing fee for the same bytes.

Real-World Pricing Examples

Scenario	Gateways	Data Processed	Monthly Cost
Idle Dev Environment	1 (Single AZ)	1 GB	$32.90
Production (Standard)	3 (Multi-AZ)	500 GB	$121.05
Data Heavy App	3 (Multi-AZ)	10 TB	$548.55

How to Reduce the Cost

1. Use Gateway Endpoints (S3/DynamoDB): These are free. Route S3 traffic through a Gateway Endpoint so it bypasses the NAT Gateway entirely. This saves the $0.045/GB fee.
2. Centralize (Transit Gateway): For large orgs, routing all traffic through a centralized inspection VPC can reduce the total processing usage, though Transit Gateway comes with its own costs.
3. Detect Idle Gateways: If a dev environment is turned off at night, the NAT Gateway is still billing you $0.045/hour.

[!TIP] Not sure if you are overpaying? Use our free AWS NAT Gateway Pricing Calculator to model your exact scenario and compare it to alternatives.