NAT Gateway Pricing Calculator - Estimate AWS NAT Gateway Costs

NAT Gateway data processing is charged for every GB that passes through the NAT Gateway, regardless of direction (inbound or outbound). In us-east-1, the rate is $0.045/GB. This is in addition to hourly charges and standard EC2 data transfer charges. Large data transfers can make NAT Gateway significantly more expensive than the hourly fee suggests.

NAT Instance can be cheaper for low-traffic scenarios. A t3.nano NAT instance costs ~$3.80/month vs $32.85/month for NAT Gateway. However, NAT Gateway provides higher bandwidth (up to 100 Gbps), automatic scaling, built-in redundancy, and no maintenance overhead. For production workloads requiring reliability, NAT Gateway is typically worth the premium. For dev/test environments with minimal traffic, NAT Instance may be more cost-effective.

Key strategies to reduce NAT Gateway costs: Use Gateway VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB (free, bypasses NAT Gateway). Use Interface endpoints for other AWS services that support PrivateLink. Deploy in a single AZ for non-production workloads. Use IPv6 with egress-only internet gateway where possible (no data processing charges). See our VPC Pricing Calculator to estimate endpoint costs.

For production high availability, AWS recommends deploying a NAT Gateway in each AZ where you have private subnets. This ensures that if one AZ fails, resources in other AZs can still reach the internet. However, each NAT Gateway costs ~$32.85/month plus data processing. For non-production workloads, a single NAT Gateway is often sufficient, with cross-AZ data transfer adding only $0.01/GB.

NAT Gateway supports up to 100 Gbps bandwidth and can handle up to 10 million packets per second. It automatically scales within these limits. If you need more capacity, you can split resources across multiple NAT Gateways. For comparison, NAT instances are limited by the instance type's network performance (e.g., t3.micro supports only ~5 Gbps).

Yes. If an EC2 instance in one AZ uses a NAT Gateway in a different AZ, you incur cross-AZ data transfer charges of $0.01/GB in each direction (so $0.02/GB round trip). This is in addition to the NAT Gateway data processing charge. To avoid this, deploy a NAT Gateway in each AZ that has private subnets, or accept the cross-AZ charges for lower-traffic environments.