BigQuery cost calculator
BigQuery charges $6.25 for each TiB a query scans on demand in the US multi-region, or $0.04 to $0.10 a slot-hour on capacity, depending on the edition, plus storage by the GiB a month.
Choose the location and how you pay for queries, then what they scan, the slots they keep busy and what you store. See the month line by line, which way of paying costs least for your queries, the scan at which slots overtake on-demand, and what logical or physical storage billing would cost. Every price comes from Google's own BigQuery price list.
The BigQuery cost calculator
Pay for the bytes each query scans. The default, with the first TiB of a month free.
Bytes billed, after partitions and clusters are pruned. INFORMATION_SCHEMA.JOBS has them.
Added by the autoscaler in steps of 50 and billed while allocated, used or not.
The time the autoscaled slots stay allocated, including at least 60 seconds after each step up.
The logical bytes of every table. INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_STORAGE gives them.
Tables and partitions not modified for 90 days in a row, at a lower price. Each partition counts on its own.
The cost
On demand in the US multi-region: 20 TiB scanned a month costs $119, the first TiB free. With 5 TiB stored and the loading, the month comes to $195.
- A month
- $195
- Queries, storage and loading
- Queries
- $119
- $6.25 a TiB
- Storage
- $76.60
- 5 TiB, logical
The month, line by line
| Charge | A month |
|---|---|
| Queries on demand19 TiB billed at $6.25 | $119 |
| Active storage2,550 GiB logical at $0.02, after the free 10 GiB | $51.00 |
| Long-term storage2,560 GiB logical at $0.01 | $25.60 |
| Batch loadFree on the shared slot pool | $0 |
| Total | $195 |
Each way to pay for the queries
| Model | Price | Queries | A month |
|---|---|---|---|
| $6.25 a TiB | $119 | $195 | |
| $0.04 a slot-hour | $528 | $605 | |
| $0.06 a slot-hour | $792 | $869 | |
| $0.10 a slot-hour | $1,320 | $1,397 |
On demand costs the same as these 100 slots on Standard ($528 a month) at 85.48 TiB scanned a month. Your queries scan 20 TiB, so on demand costs less.
Billed by physical size instead, the same storage would cost $43.12 a month, $33.48 less. Physical billing pays off when the data compresses well and little of it is kept for time travel.
Each location
| Location | A TiB | A GiB stored | A month |
|---|---|---|---|
| $6.25 | $0.02 | $195 | |
| $6.25 | $0.02 | $195 | |
| $7.19 | $0.02 | $213 | |
| $6.25 | $0.023 | $218 | |
| $6.25 | $0.023 | $218 | |
| $6.25 | $0.023 | $218 | |
| $6.25 | $0.023 | $218 | |
| $6.25 | $0.023 | $218 | |
| $6.25 | $0.023 | $218 | |
| $6.25 | $0.023 | $218 | |
| $6.25 | $0.023 | $218 | |
| $7.50 | $0.02 | $219 | |
| $7.50 | $0.02 | $219 | |
| $7.50 | $0.02 | $219 | |
| $7.50 | $0.02 | $219 | |
| $6.56 | $0.023 | $224 | |
| $6.56 | $0.023 | $224 | |
| $6.56 | $0.02415 | $229 | |
| $6.56 | $0.02415 | $229 | |
| $8.44 | $0.02 | $237 | |
| $7.50 | $0.023 | $242 | |
| $7.50 | $0.023 | $242 | |
| $7.50 | $0.023 | $242 | |
| $7.50 | $0.023 | $242 | |
| $7.50 | $0.023 | $242 | |
| $7.50 | $0.023 | $242 | |
| $7.50 | $0.023 | $242 | |
| $7.81 | $0.023 | $248 | |
| $7.81 | $0.023 | $248 | |
| $7.81 | $0.023 | $248 | |
| $8.06 | $0.023 | $253 | |
| $8.13 | $0.023 | $254 | |
| $8.13 | $0.023 | $254 | |
| $8.13 | $0.023 | $254 | |
| $8.13 | $0.023 | $254 | |
| $7.59 | $0.02645 | $259 | |
| $6.81 | $0.0299 | $259 | |
| $8.44 | $0.023 | $260 | |
| $8.44 | $0.023 | $260 | |
| $7.50 | $0.0276 | $262 | |
| $7.50 | $0.0276 | $262 | |
| $8.75 | $0.023 | $266 | |
| $7.81 | $0.02875 | $273 | |
| $8.75 | $0.025 | $274 | |
| $9.63 | $0.023 | $282 | |
| $8.94 | $0.03289 | $312 | |
| $11.25 | $0.023 | $313 | |
| $10.00 | $0.037 | $351 |
Cheapest first. A dataset's location is set when it is made and cannot be changed.
List prices in US dollars, before tax, from Google's BigQuery pricing page. Not counted: the 1-minute minimum each time slots scale up, spend-based commitments, BI Engine, BigQuery ML, data transfer between locations, the Storage Read API, and Omni on AWS and Azure.
How the calculator works it out
BigQuery bills queries one of 2 ways. On demand, each query is billed for the bytes it scans, at $6.25 a TiB in the US multi-region, with the first 1 TiB of every month free. A query is billed at least 10 MB for each table it reads, and a query answered from the cache, or one that fails, costs nothing. The example scans 20 TiB a month, so 19 TiB are billed: $119.
On capacity, you pay for slots, BigQuery's units of compute, by the slot-hour in one of 3 editions: $0.04 on Standard, $0.06 on Enterprise and $0.10 on Enterprise Plus. The autoscaler adds slots in steps of 50 when queries need them and keeps each step at least 60 seconds, and allocated slots are billed whether a query uses them or not. The example's 100 slots for 6 hours a day on 22 days are 13,200 slot-hours: $528 on Standard, $792 on Enterprise.
Enterprise and Enterprise Plus can also keep baseline slots, which are always on and billed for every hour of the month, used or not. Baseline slots bought as a commitment cost 20 percent less for 1 year and 40 percent less for 3. The calculator bills the baseline for 730 hours, Google's month, and the autoscaler only for the slots above it.
Storage is billed by the GiB a month, and data in tables or partitions not modified for 90 days costs less as long-term storage. A dataset is billed by logical size, the uncompressed bytes, by default, or by physical size, the compressed bytes on disk at a higher rate. Physical billing also charges for the bytes kept for time travel and fail-safe, at the active rate. The first 10 GiB a month are free.
Each location
A page for every BigQuery region and multi-region: its price a TiB on demand, a slot-hour in each edition and under each commitment, storage and streaming.
Multi-region
- US multi-region$6.25 a TiB
- EU multi-region$6.25 a TiB
North America
- Alabama$6.25 a TiB
- Columbus$6.25 a TiB
- Dallas$7.50 a TiB
- Iowa$6.25 a TiB
- Las Vegas$6.25 a TiB
- Los Angeles$8.44 a TiB
- Mexico$6.81 a TiB
- Montreal$6.56 a TiB
- Northern Virginia$6.25 a TiB
- Oregon$6.25 a TiB
- Phoenix$6.25 a TiB
- Salt Lake City$8.44 a TiB
- South Carolina$6.25 a TiB
- Toronto$6.56 a TiB
Europe
Africa
- Johannesburg$7.50 a TiB
Asia
Questions
- How much does BigQuery cost per TB?
- On demand, BigQuery charges $6.25 for each TiB a query scans in the US multi-region, and from $6.25 to $11.25 a TiB in single regions, the dearest being Sao Paulo (southamerica-east1). The first 1 TiB a month is free, and cached or failed queries cost nothing. A TiB is 1,024 GiB, about 10 percent more than a TB.
- Is BigQuery on-demand or capacity pricing cheaper?
- It depends on how much your queries scan for the slots they keep busy. In the example, 100 slots for 6 hours a day on 22 days cost $528 a month on Standard, the same as scanning 85.48 TiB on demand. Below that scan, on demand costs less; above it, slots do, as long as they are enough to keep your queries fast.
- How much does a BigQuery slot cost?
- Pay as you go, a slot-hour costs $0.04 on Standard, $0.06 on Enterprise and $0.10 on Enterprise Plus in the US multi-region, billed by the second with a 1-minute minimum. A slot kept all month on Enterprise costs $43.80. Single regions charge the same or more.
- What is the difference between BigQuery Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus?
- Standard has autoscaling slots only, at most 1,600 in a reservation, with no slot commitments and no BI Engine. Enterprise adds baseline slots, 1 and 3-year slot commitments, BI Engine and idle capacity sharing between reservations. Enterprise Plus adds compliance controls through Assured Workloads and managed disaster recovery.
- How do BigQuery capacity commitments work?
- On Enterprise and Enterprise Plus, you commit to a number of slots for 1 year, at 20 percent off, or 3 years, at 40 percent off, in steps of 50 slots with a minimum of 50. The committed slots are billed every hour of the term. Standard has no slot commitments; spend-based commitments of a dollar amount an hour, 10 percent off for 1 year and 20 percent for 3, cover all 3 editions.
- How much does BigQuery storage cost?
- In the US multi-region, logical storage costs $0.02 a GiB a month active and $0.01 long-term, and physical storage $0.04 and $0.02. Data in a table or partition not modified for 90 days in a row becomes long-term. The first 10 GiB a month are free.
- Should I use logical or physical storage billing in BigQuery?
- Physical billing costs more a GiB but counts the compressed bytes, so it saves money when your data compresses well. It also bills the bytes kept for time travel and fail-safe, so tables that change often can cost more. You set it for each dataset, and after a change you wait 14 days before changing again.
- Does BigQuery charge for loading data?
- Batch loading is free on the shared slot pool. Streaming costs extra: in Iowa (us-central1) the Storage Write API charges $0.025 a GiB after the first 2 TiB a month, and the legacy streaming inserts $0.01 a 200 MiB ($0.0512 a GiB), counting every row as at least 1 KB.
- Is there a BigQuery free tier?
- Yes. Every month the first 1 TiB of on-demand queries and the first 10 GiB of storage are free, and so are batch loads, cached queries and failed queries. Streaming with the Storage Write API is free for the first 2 TiB a month.
Put this calculator on your own site
Copy the code into any web page: a blog post, a course page or your team's wiki. The calculator runs in a frame and shows the same figures as this page, so when the prices change here they change on your page too. It is free and needs no account, and nothing a reader types is sent anywhere.
The code opens the calculator with the settings you have chosen above.
The short script at the end lets the frame grow and shrink with the calculator. Where a page cannot take scripts, choose a fixed height and the frame scrolls.
<iframe src="https://tecyfy.com/embed/bigquery-cost" title="BigQuery cost calculator" width="100%" height="3900" style="border:0;display:block" loading="lazy" allow="clipboard-write"></iframe>
<p><a href="https://tecyfy.com/data-engineering/bigquery-cost">BigQuery cost calculator</a> by Tecyfy</p>
<script>addEventListener("message",function(e){if(e.origin!=="https://tecyfy.com"||!e.data||e.data.type!=="tecyfy:height")return;var h=Number(e.data.height);if(!(h>0))return;document.querySelectorAll("iframe").forEach(function(f){if(f.contentWindow===e.source)f.style.height=Math.min(h,20000)+"px"})})</script>Sources
Where each fact comes from
- 1Google Cloud: BigQuery pricing
- 2BigQuery: Introduction to BigQuery editions
- 3BigQuery: Introduction to slots autoscaling
- 4BigQuery: Introduction to workload management
- 5BigQuery: Manage workload commitments
- 6Google Cloud: Spend-based committed use discounts
- 7BigQuery: Overview of BigQuery storage
- 8BigQuery: Introduction to datasets (storage billing models)
- 9BigQuery: Locations