AWS's regional NAT gateway simplifies multi-AZ networking but costs the same per hour. The savings are elsewhere: free gateway endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB, ECR pulls kept off NAT, public IPv4 addresses at $3.65 a month each, and IPv6 egress that has no hourly charge.
NAT gateways are one of the first lines people find when they read a bill closely. In US East a NAT gateway costs $0.045 per hour and $0.045 per GB processed. One per Availability Zone across three AZs is about $99 a month before a single byte moves, and every gigabyte through it costs as much again as the hour.
Since November 2025 a NAT gateway can be regional. One gateway spans the AZs where your workloads run, expands to new AZs automatically and needs no public subnet. Route tables point at one gateway instead of one per AZ.
It is billed per AZ it runs in: three AZs for an hour is three NAT gateway-hours, the same as three zonal gateways. Data processing is the same $0.045/GB. Choose it for operations, not for cost. Three details worth knowing:
Expansion to a new AZ takes 15–20 minutes on average and up to 60. Until then, traffic from that AZ is routed through another AZ, which adds cross-AZ data transfer.
Private NAT (for routing between private networks) is not supported. Keep zonal gateways for that.
Each AZ scales to 100 Gbps and 32 IP addresses, and a VPC can have five regional NAT gateways.
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In most accounts we review, a large share of NAT data processing is traffic to AWS itself: S3, ECR image pulls, DynamoDB, CloudWatch Logs, Secrets Manager. None of it needs to go through NAT.
Interface endpoints are not free. Each costs about $7.30 a month per AZ. Add them only where traffic justifies it: at $0.045 vs $0.01 per GB, an interface endpoint in three AZs pays for itself at roughly 630 GB a month. The S3 gateway endpoint is the one to add everywhere, today.
Every public IPv4 address costs $0.005 per hour, in use or idle: $3.65 a month each. Load balancers use several, as do NAT gateways, EC2 instances with auto-assigned public IPs and forgotten Elastic IPs. Amazon VPC IP Address Manager has a free tier that reports public IP usage across the account. The usual findings are idle Elastic IPs, instances in public subnets that only needed outbound access, and test load balancers nobody deleted.
Add the S3 and DynamoDB gateway endpoints to every VPC. Free, and usually the largest single saving.
Split NAT data processing by destination using VPC Flow Logs, so you know what is behind the number.
Add interface endpoints only for destinations above the break-even.
Delete idle Elastic IPs and stop auto-assigning public IPs in subnets that do not need them.
Move development VPCs to a single NAT, or to regional NAT in one AZ, if an AZ outage in dev is acceptable.
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As of October 25, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.