Estimate monthly EFS costs across storage classes and throughput modes.
Last verified: May 2026
Output will appear here...The EFS Cost Estimator calculates your expected monthly spend on Amazon Elastic File System based on storage volume, throughput mode, and storage class mix. It supports EFS Standard, EFS Infrequent Access (IA), EFS One Zone, and One Zone-IA storage classes as well as Bursting, Provisioned, and Elastic throughput modes. You can model different usage patterns to see how lifecycle policies that move cold files to IA can dramatically lower costs. The tool provides a clear cost breakdown so you can make informed decisions about shared file storage for EC2, ECS, Lambda, and EKS workloads.
EFS IA storage costs significantly less per GB than Standard (roughly 92% cheaper), but you pay a per-read fee each time an IA file is accessed. The estimator lets you specify what percentage of your data is in IA and how often it is read so you can find the cost-optimal lifecycle threshold.
Bursting throughput scales with the size of your file system and uses burst credits for spikes. Elastic throughput automatically scales up to 10 GiB/s with no provisioning and charges only for what you use, making it ideal for spiky, unpredictable workloads. The estimator models both so you can compare.
Your team runs a CI artifact share on EFS with 4 TB total and 200 GB read per day. The bill is ~$1,200/month on EFS Standard. You enable Lifecycle Management with a 30-day IA threshold. After two months, 80% of data has aged to IA. New monthly cost: 800 GB Standard ($240) + 3,200 GB IA ($80) + IA access ($60 for 6 TB read/month) = $380. Savings: $820/month with no application changes.
The estimator computes EFS cost as the sum of: storage class GB × per-GB rate (Standard ~$0.30, IA ~$0.025), throughput cost (Bursting is included in storage; Provisioned billed per MiB/s; Elastic billed per GiB read+written), and IA access cost ($0.01/GB read). It applies the lifecycle policy split (e.g., 70% IA after 30 days) to the storage volume before pricing.
Lifecycle Management to IA isn't a free win — every IA file read costs $0.01/GB on top of the cheaper storage rate. If a file is read more than ~3 times per month, IA costs MORE than Standard. Always profile actual access patterns before turning on lifecycle.
Elastic Throughput is almost always the right default in 2026 unless you have a workload with sustained predictable throughput >256 MiB/s. Bursting throughput's burst credit model is a footgun: a long-running job can drain credits and silently throttle to baseline (50 KiB/s per GB). Elastic eliminates that class of incident.
EFS One Zone is 47% cheaper than Standard but lives in a single AZ. Acceptable for dev/test, but a single AZ outage means total data loss for One Zone. Never use it for anything you can't afford to recreate from another source.
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