Paste a line item from your invoice and find what it bills for, across the Google Cloud services covered so far.
Network Inter Region Egress
This is traffic between two Google Cloud regions: it never leaves Google, but it is still billed.
The rate depends on where the source and destination regions are, and intercontinental pairs cost several times what two regions on the same continent do. It is the usual hidden cost of a multi-region architecture.
Billed: Per gibibyte moved between two Google Cloud regions, priced by the source and destination area (North America, Europe, Asia and so on).
What triggers this charge
- VM-to-VM traffic between regions, charged to the project of the sending VM. This includes GKE nodes and self-managed databases replicating to another region.
- Cross-region database replication, including Cloud SQL read replicas and Spanner multi-region configurations.
- A multi-region load balancer routing traffic to a backend in another region.
- Disaster-recovery replication, which runs continuously whether or not you ever fail over.
- Reading a Cloud Storage bucket from another region, or writing to a dual-region or multi-region bucket. The same idea, but billed under Cloud Storage SKUs (data transfer within Google Cloud, inter-region replication), so look there too.
- BigQuery dataset copies, load jobs and exports that cross regions, billed as network data transfer.
How to reduce it
Co-locate data and compute
The overwhelming majority of avoidable inter-region egress comes from a service in one region reading a bucket or database in another. Moving one of them removes the charge outright rather than reducing it.
Check that multi-region is a decision, not an accident
Dual-region and multi-region Cloud Storage buckets bill inter-region replication on every write. If the requirement is durability rather than latency, a single region with cross-region backups is usually far cheaper.
Cache across the boundary
Where cross-region reads are genuinely required, a regional cache in front of the remote source turns a per-read charge into a per-refresh charge.
Rates
Sources and review
- Explanation reviewed:
- 1 Nov 2026, against Google Cloud networking pricing, Cloud Storage pricing and 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
Now find out how much of this you are actually paying.
Finitizer breaks your Google Cloud bill down to the SKU, shows how each one has moved since last week, and separates rate changes from usage changes, so you know whether to talk to engineering or to procurement.
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