Paste a line item from your invoice and find what it bills for, across the Google Cloud services covered so far.
BigQuery Active Logical Storage
Storage for table data that has been modified in the last 90 days.
Data untouched for 90 consecutive days moves automatically to a long-term SKU at about half the price, no purchase, no configuration. Any write to a table resets that clock.
Billed: Per gibibyte-month of uncompressed data modified within the last 90 days, prorated per second, after a small monthly free allowance. A companion long-term SKU covers the rest at roughly half the rate.
What triggers this charge
- All table data in datasets using the logical (uncompressed) billing model.
- Any modification to a table, which returns it to active pricing and restarts the 90-day clock. On a partitioned table only the modified partitions go back.
- Daily full-refresh pipelines using WRITE_TRUNCATE, which guarantee the table never qualifies for long-term pricing.
How to reduce it
Load incrementally instead of truncating
On a partitioned table the 90-day clock runs per partition, so writing only new partitions lets history age into the discount by itself.
Compare the two billing models per dataset
Physical (compressed) billing charges roughly double per byte but bills the compressed size, so it wins wherever compression beats about 2×. Well-structured columnar data often compresses far better than that. Count the catch: under physical billing, time-travel and fail-safe bytes are billed too, so heavily updated tables can lose the advantage.
Set expirations on staging data
Table and partition expiration turn a permanent charge into a temporary one, and staging datasets are usually where forgotten terabytes live.
Rates
Sources and review
- Explanation reviewed:
- 1 Nov 2026, against BigQuery pricing.
- Rates verified:
- not yet. No rate is shown on this page until one is loaded from the Cloud Billing Catalog API.
Related charges
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