AWS Direct Connect pricing in 2026

AWS Direct Connect bills two meters, and only one of them responds to your traffic. A 1 Gbps dedicated port is $0.30 an hour whether or not a packet crosses it, and data leaving a contiguous-US Region for a contiguous-US Direct Connect location is $0.0200 per GB against $0.09 per GB over the internet. So there is a monthly volume above which the port pays for itself. For 1 Gbps it is about 3,257 GB, roughly 1% of what the port could carry. AWS publishes both sides of that arithmetic and never does the division.

How much does AWS Direct Connect cost per port-hour in 2026?

Between $0.03 and $85.00 an hour, depending on the port. The Direct Connect FAQ reduces the bill to one sentence: "AWS Direct Connect has two separate charges: port hours and data transfer. Pricing is per port-hour consumed for each port type. Partial port hours consumed are billed as full hours." The Direct Connect pricing page is blunt about what a port hour measures: "Even when no data is passing through the port, you are charged for port hours."

Dedicated port rates are global, with one exception the page states plainly: "Port hour pricing for dedicated connections is consistent across all AWS Direct Connect locations globally, except in Japan."

The monthly column follows AWS's own convention on that page: "This example assumes 8,760 hours in a year / 12 months = 730 hours.". A 400 Gbps port that nobody has sent traffic through yet is $744,600 a year. A 1 Gbps port is $2,628.

Is a hosted Direct Connect connection cheaper than a dedicated one?

Below 1 Gbps, yes, because dedicated does not go that low. At 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps, where the two overlap, hosted costs about 10% more per port-hour. Hosted 1 Gbps is $0.33 against dedicated $0.30, and hosted 10 Gbps is $2.48 against dedicated $2.25. Both numbers are on the same pricing page, in two tables separated by a paragraph, and the comparison is never drawn.

The last column is ours, and it shows that hosted pricing is four flat bands rather than a curve: everything from 200 to 500 Mbps costs the same $0.400 per Gbps-hour. Dedicated sits at $0.300, $0.225, $0.225 and $0.2125 for 1, 10, 100 and 400 Gbps, so a 10 Gbps dedicated port buys bandwidth 25% cheaper per bit than a 1 Gbps one.

Two documented limits push the same way. The hosted connection user guide warns that "AWS uses traffic policing on hosted connections, which means that when the traffic rate reaches the configured maximum rate, excess traffic is dropped. This might result in bursty traffic having a lower throughput than non-bursty traffic." And the Direct Connect quotas page allows only one virtual interface per hosted connection against 50 on a dedicated one, and says of the hosted figure that "This limit cannot be increased." If you need a private VIF and a public VIF, that is two hosted connections and two port-hour charges. Dedicated has its own trap: per the dedicated connection user guide, "You can't change the port speed after you create the connection request. To change the port speed, you must create and configure a new connection."

What does AWS Direct Connect charge per GB for data transfer out and in?

Data transfer in is free and data transfer out is not. The pricing page says it without qualification: "AWS Direct Connect data transfer in is charged at $0.00 per GB in all locations." Data transfer out is charged per gigabyte, and the rate is a function of two places rather than one: "When calculating DTO, exact pricing depends on the AWS Region or AWS Local Zone, and the AWS Direct Connect location, you are using (see tables below)."

The published grid runs from $0.0200 to $0.1923 per GB, a spread of 9.6 times. A terabyte costs $20.48 at the bottom of that range and $196.92 at the top. From a Europe Region alone the rate is $0.0200 per GB to a Direct Connect location in Europe and $0.1107 per GB to one in South America or Mexico, 5.54 times, for traffic leaving the same Region.

Seven rows out of a grid fourteen columns wide. Read the full table on the pricing page before modelling anything outside the contiguous United States, because the arithmetic in the next section does not transfer between geographies. One boundary is worth stating up front: "AWS Direct Connect only sends data to your AWS Direct Connect location, it does not transfer data out of AWS over the internet." The port replaces internet egress only for traffic that was already going to your own network.

On the bill, the CUR data transfer guide gives you the strings to grep for: "Direct Connect data transfer over a public virtual interface have usage types that end with DataXfer-In or DataXfer-Out", while private and transit VIF traffic ends with DataXfer-In:dc.3 or DataXfer-Out:dc.3. Hosted port hours are grouped by capacity into items the FAQ names as HCPortUsage:50M through HCPortUsage:25G. It is the same exercise as separating data transfer out from everything else.

How much data transfer out does an AWS Direct Connect port need to pay for itself?

This is the number AWS gives you the inputs for and never computes. The hypothetical below compares two ways of moving the same bytes from a contiguous-US Region to your own network: over the internet, or over Direct Connect. Internet rates come from the worked examples on the AWS VPN pricing page, which states them in text: "The first 100 GB are free, so you pay for 24,900 GB. For the first 10,240 GB, you pay at $0.09 per GB. For the remaining 14,660 GB, you pay at $0.085 per GB." Direct Connect is priced as the port at 730 hours plus $0.0200 per GB.

Hypothetical, AWS list rates, contiguous United States only. Every port there repays its own hourly charge at under 3% of the traffic it could carry, and the gigabit-and-above ports do it at around 1%. The last column is what reframes the decision: a port is almost never bought for the egress discount alone, yet the egress discount alone justifies it at a duty cycle most links would call idle.

Three ports are missing from that table on purpose. A 25 Gbps hosted connection, and 100 and 400 Gbps dedicated, break even above 51,300 GB a month, and the AWS page we sourced the internet rates from stops stating a rate after 50 TB. Rather than guess the next tier, use the pricing page and the AWS Pricing Calculator it links to.

Oversizing reverses the result, which is why the break-even is per port and not per service. At 20 TB (20,480 GB) out of a US Region, internet egress is $1,783.50. A 1 Gbps dedicated port carrying that traffic is $628.60, saving $1,154.90. A 10 Gbps dedicated port is $2,052.10, or $268.60 worse than internet rates. Same discount per gigabyte, and the maths inverts.

Two caveats, both pushing in opposite directions. The pricing page's examples exclude the physical circuit: "This does not include any additional charges that may come from your AWS Direct Connect Delivery Partner or other providers." Cross-connect and colocation fees sit outside the AWS bill, so every break-even above is a floor. Against that, a Site-to-Site VPN pays its own hourly fee on top of internet egress, which this comparison ignores, and including it would move the break-evens down. If a VPN is the real alternative, price it against what a Site-to-Site VPN connection costs per hour.

When does AWS start billing a Direct Connect port that carries no traffic?

Ninety days after the paperwork, whether you have plugged it in or not. The dedicated connection user guide is specific: "Billing automatically starts when the port is active or 90 days after the LOA has been issued, whichever comes first. You can avoid billing charges by deleting the port prior to activation or within 90 days of the LOA being issued."

Read that against the pricing page's summary of the commercial terms, which says you "pay only for what you use and there is no minimum fee. There are no setup charges, and you may cancel at any time." Both are true and they are not the same promise. A 10 Gbps port ordered for a migration that slipped, left unactivated past day 90, starts billing at $1,642.50 a month for carrying nothing. Hosted connections start their clock at acceptance instead: "Port hours are billed once you have accepted the Hosted Connection. Port charges will continue to be billed as long as the Hosted Connection is provisioned for your use."

Does an AWS Direct Connect gateway have a charge of its own?

No. The FAQ answers it in one line: "There are no charges for using an AWS Direct Connect gateway. You will pay applicable egress data charges based on the source remote AWS Region and port hour charges." The pricing page says the same thing from the rate side, that with a gateway "you will pay applicable DTO data rates based on the AWS Region that is the source of the traffic and the AWS Direct Connect location where it is connected." So the gateway is free and the Region your traffic starts in is what sets the per-GB rate. Link aggregation is free too: "There is no extra charge for using a LAG."

What is not free is what you attach to it. The Direct Connect gateway documentation describes associating one with a Transit Gateway to "Manage a single connection for multiple VPCs or VPNs that are in the same Region". The FAQ prices that convenience: "Please note that all applicable AWS Transit Gateway specific charges (Data Processing and Attachment) will be in addition to the Direct Connect Data Transfer Out." Those meters are covered in what a Transit Gateway actually costs, and they are usually larger than the Direct Connect DTO beside them.

One more charge Direct Connect does not absorb. Asked whether regional traffic gets the Direct Connect rate, the FAQ says: "No, data transfer between Availability Zones in a Region will be billed at the regular Regional data transfer rate in the same month in which the usage occurred." Traffic that crosses a zone before it reaches your port is still cross-AZ data transfer at the normal rate.

What does Direct Connect SiteLink cost on top of the port?

A separate charge that the pricing page does not currently put a number on. SiteLink sends data directly between two Direct Connect locations instead of routing it through an AWS Region, and the Direct Connect pricing page describes it as off by default: "The SiteLink feature is off by default and can be turned on or off at any time." The Direct Connect FAQ adds that "SiteLink works with both hosted and dedicated connections", so nothing about the connection type exempts you from it.

We are not quoting a SiteLink rate here, deliberately. The pricing page carried a flat per-virtual-interface hourly fee and a worked example for it earlier on the day this post was written, and neither survives in the version the page serves now: the two examples it currently publishes cover port hours and data transfer out only. A rate we cannot re-fetch is a rate we will not print, so price SiteLink from the pricing page itself before committing to it, and treat it as a third always-on meter rather than a feature toggle. The same warning applies to the per-GB tables on that page, which are the authority on your own Region pair.

Does AWS bill Direct Connect on a 730-hour month or a 720-hour month?

Neither. It bills actual port hours, and partial hours as full hours. But AWS's own pages model the month two different ways, and if you build a comparison spreadsheet out of them you inherit the mismatch. The Direct Connect pricing page uses "8,760 hours in a year / 12 months = 730 hours". The Direct Connect FAQ, explaining how hosted port hours appear on a bill, uses a different one: "For a month with 720 total hours, the port-hour total for this item will be 1,440". So does the VPN pricing page, whose first example turns $0.05 an hour into "$36.00 per month in connection fees", which is 720 hours.

The gap is 1.39%. On a 10 Gbps dedicated port that is $1,642.50 against $1,620.00, a difference of $22.50 a month and $270 a year. On a 400 Gbps port it is $850 a month. Neither page is wrong, because neither claims to be a bill. It is a reason to normalise the convention before putting Direct Connect and a VPN side by side in one sheet, since the two pricing pages will not do it for you. For the figure that matches reality, multiply by the actual hours in the month, which range from 672 to 744.

Two things belong on the same page of the model. Direct Connect data transfer, per the FAQ, "will be aggregated to your management account", so the per-GB charge lands where consolidated billing puts it rather than on the account that generated it. And traffic still leaving through an internet path pays a different set of meters, which is usually where a hybrid bill hides its surprises: check what a NAT Gateway costs per gigabyte before assuming the port is the expensive part.