Route 53 Pricing Calculator

AWS Route 53 Pricing Calculator

This Route 53 pricing calculator estimates your monthly and annual AWS Route 53 bill from the inputs that actually drive it: how many hosted zones you run, how many DNS queries each one answers, how many health checks you have configured, how many Traffic Flow policy records you keep, and how many Resolver endpoints you operate. Enter your numbers and the breakdown updates instantly in the browser, with a copy button for pasting the estimate into a ticket or a budget sheet.

Route 53 pricing confuses people because it is not one price. It is five independent meters, three of which are per-month fixed charges and two of which are per-million-query usage charges. A single domain with modest traffic genuinely does cost about a dollar a month. The same account with a handful of Traffic Flow policies can cost several hundred. This calculator makes the difference visible before the invoice does.

What the Calculator Models

The estimator covers the following Route 53 charges. Prices below are the published on-demand US rates used by the calculator; AWS can and does revise them, so treat the output as a planning estimate and confirm against the official AWS Route 53 pricing page before committing to a budget.

Domain registration and renewal fees are not included. Those are per-TLD list prices set separately by AWS and the registry — roughly $13 a year for a .com, but wildly different for other extensions — and they do not vary with your traffic, so they are not part of this recurring-infrastructure estimate.

How to Use the Route 53 Cost Estimator

1. Add your hosted zones. Name each one and enter its expected monthly query volume. Pick the routing type per zone: standard, latency-based, or Geo DNS, since each is billed at a different per-million rate.
2. Add health checks. Choose the check type and tick the fast-interval or latency-measurement options where you use them; both add a flat dollar per check per month.
3. Enter Traffic Flow policy records. This is the line item that surprises people. At $50 per policy record per month, five policies cost more than five hundred hosted zones.
4. Enter Resolver endpoints and query volume if you run hybrid DNS between a VPC and on-premises. Endpoints are billed hourly, at 730 hours per month.
5. Read the breakdown and copy it. The tool shows the per-component split plus the monthly and annualised totals.

Worked Example: A Typical Small Estate

Take a company with 6 domains in Route 53, all using standard routing, together answering 12 million queries a month, plus 3 basic health checks against AWS endpoints and no Traffic Flow policies.

• Hosted zones: 6 × $0.50 = $3.00
• Queries: 12 × $0.40 = $4.80
• Health checks: 3 × $0.50 = $1.50
• Total: $9.30 per month, $111.60 per year

Now add three Traffic Flow policy records to the same estate and the monthly total jumps to $159.30 — a seventeenfold increase from a feature many teams enable without realising it carries a fixed monthly fee per policy record. That single insight is usually worth more than any query-volume optimisation.

Understanding the Hosted Zone Charge

The $0.50 per hosted zone per month figure is the one people search for most, and it comes with details worth knowing. It is a flat monthly charge per zone, not prorated by usage, though AWS does not charge for a hosted zone deleted within 12 hours of creation. Beyond your 25th zone the rate drops to $0.10 per zone per month, which is why large estates scale more gently than the headline price suggests: 100 zones cost $20.00, not $50.00. The calculator applies this tiering automatically as you add zones.

Note also that alias queries pointing at supported AWS resources — an ELB, a CloudFront distribution, an S3 website endpoint, another record in the same hosted zone — are not charged. If a large share of your traffic resolves through aliases, your real query bill will be lower than a naive estimate based on total resolution volume. Enter only your billable query volume for the most accurate figure.

Where Route 53 Costs Actually Come From

Across most accounts the cost distribution is lopsided. Hosted zones are cheap and predictable. Query charges scale linearly and only matter above roughly 50 million queries a month. Health checks are individually small but multiply quickly across a large fleet, especially with the fast-interval and latency-measurement add-ons that each double or triple the base rate. Traffic Flow and Resolver endpoints are the two components that turn a rounding-error bill into a real one.

If you are comparing Route 53 against another managed DNS provider, or sizing a broader migration, the cloud cost comparison tool covers cross-provider pricing, and the AWS Bedrock pricing calculator handles the AI inference side of an AWS bill. To inspect what a zone is actually publishing before you migrate it, use the DNS lookup tool.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does an AWS Route 53 hosted zone cost per month?

$0.50 per hosted zone per month for your first 25 zones, then $0.10 per zone per month for each additional zone. The charge is flat and independent of query volume. Zones deleted within 12 hours of creation are not billed.

Does this calculator include AWS domain registration pricing?

No. Registration and renewal fees are set per TLD and are billed annually rather than monthly, so they are excluded. Check the AWS Route 53 domain registration price list for your specific extension and add it to the annual total yourself.

How much do Route 53 DNS queries cost?

$0.40 per million for standard queries, $0.60 per million for latency-based routing, and $0.70 per million for Geo DNS. Alias queries resolving to supported AWS resources are free.

Why is Route 53 health check pricing higher than I expected?

The base rate depends on the endpoint. Checks against AWS endpoints are $0.50 per month; checks against non-AWS endpoints are $0.75. HTTPS checks cost $1.00 and string-matching checks $2.00, and the fast-interval and latency-measurement options each add $1.00. A string-matching HTTPS check with both options enabled is $4.00 a month, eight times the base rate.

What is a Traffic Flow policy record and why is it $50?

Traffic Flow is Route 53's visual policy editor for building complex routing trees. Each policy record you attach to a DNS name costs $50 per month regardless of query volume. For simple failover or weighted routing you can often use plain record sets instead and avoid the charge entirely.

Is there a Route 53 free tier?

There is no free tier for hosted zones or queries. Alias queries to AWS resources are free, and health checks against AWS endpoints are the cheapest tier, but every hosted zone incurs its monthly charge from day one.

Are these prices current?

The calculator uses published on-demand US rates. AWS revises pricing periodically and rates differ in some regions such as AWS China. Use this estimate for planning and verify against the official AWS pricing page before signing off a budget.

Is the calculator free and private?

Yes. It runs entirely in your browser, requires no AWS credentials or account access, and nothing you enter is transmitted or stored.