AWS Clarifies Amazon VPC Peering Charges

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released guidance to clarify charges associated with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering connections. A recent blog post outlines how customers can identify and analyze the newly itemized charges for intra-region VPC peering, which took effect early in 2025.

This enhancement in billing transparency allows customers to more precisely track and understand costs related to data transfer that crosses different Availability Zones (AZs). Previously, such traffic could be less distinctly represented within overall billing summaries.

A VPC peering connection establishes a networking link between two VPCs, enabling traffic routing via private IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. There is no charge to establish a VPC peering connection. Data transfer that remains within a single Availability Zone over a peering connection is free, even when occurring between different accounts.

Charges are incurred for data transfer over VPC peering connections that traverse multiple Availability Zones and AWS Regions. These cross-AZ charges are now more clearly represented under the usage type "VpcPeering" (VpcPeering-In-Bytes and VpcPeering-Out-Bytes), associated with the source service generating the VPC peering usage, such as Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), and Amazon VPC.