Estimate monthly NAT Gateway costs based on hours and data processed.
Last verified: April 2026
Output will appear here...The NAT Gateway Cost Estimator calculates monthly AWS NAT Gateway expenses based on provisioning hours and data processing volume. NAT Gateway pricing has two components: an hourly charge for each gateway and a per-gigabyte data processing fee. This tool helps you model costs across availability zones, compare single vs. multi-AZ NAT Gateway deployments, and identify opportunities to reduce data transfer charges through architecture changes.
NAT Gateway charges consist of an hourly fee (approximately $0.045/hour in us-east-1) and a data processing fee ($0.045/GB) for all traffic that flows through it. Both inbound and outbound data processing are charged, making high-throughput workloads expensive.
Use VPC Gateway Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB traffic (free), use Interface Endpoints for other AWS services, consolidate NAT Gateways where single-AZ risk is acceptable, and consider NAT instances for very low-throughput workloads.
For production workloads, AWS recommends a NAT Gateway in each AZ to avoid cross-AZ data charges and single points of failure. However, for development or cost-sensitive environments, a single NAT Gateway can serve multiple AZs at the cost of reduced resilience and cross-AZ data transfer fees.
Your monthly AWS bill shows $2,400 in NAT Gateway charges for a staging environment. You plug the numbers into the estimator: 3 NAT Gateways (one per AZ) running 24/7 at $97/month each, plus 15 TB of data processing at $675. Investigation reveals that 12 TB of that traffic is going to S3 and ECR. You add a Gateway Endpoint for S3 and an Interface Endpoint for ECR, consolidate to a single NAT Gateway, and next month's bill drops to $280. Total savings: $2,120/month from a 20-minute change.
The estimator calculates NAT Gateway costs by combining hourly provisioning charges (per gateway per hour, prorated to monthly) with data processing fees (per GB for all traffic transiting the gateway). It models single-AZ versus multi-AZ deployments by multiplying the hourly charge by the number of AZs, and adds cross-AZ data transfer fees when traffic originates from a different AZ than the NAT Gateway. The output shows a breakdown of each cost component and total monthly estimate.
NAT Gateway data processing charges apply to ALL traffic passing through it, including traffic to other AWS services. The single biggest cost reduction: add VPC Gateway Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB (free) and Interface Endpoints for ECR, CloudWatch, STS, and other frequently called AWS APIs. Teams routinely cut NAT Gateway bills by 60-80% this way.
A NAT Gateway in every AZ costs 3x the hourly fee (3 x $0.045/hr = $97/month just for provisioning). For dev/test environments, one NAT Gateway in a single AZ is fine — the cross-AZ data transfer fee ($0.01/GB) is almost always cheaper than running two extra gateways.
NAT Instances (t4g.nano at ~$3/month) are a legitimate alternative for low-throughput workloads like dev environments or bastion hosts that need occasional outbound internet. They lack the automatic scaling and 45 Gbps throughput of NAT Gateway, but at 1/30th the cost they're worth considering.
Was this tool helpful?
Disclaimer: This tool runs entirely in your browser. No data is sent to our servers. Always verify outputs before using them in production. AWS, Azure, and GCP are trademarks of their respective owners.