Azure Blob Storage Pricing UK 2026

Azure Blob Storage pricing UK South 2026 in GBP. Hot vs Cool vs Cold vs Archive tier comparison, LRS vs GRS redundancy costs, operations pricing, and early deletion penalties. Updated March 2026.

Prices last verified: March 2026

Hot, Cool, Cold and Archive tier costs for UK South in GBP. Redundancy options, operations pricing, and early deletion penalties explained.

Built and verified by an independent Azure engineer, frustrated with the official calculator.

Overview

Most Azure teams default to Hot storage and overpay. Hot costs approximately £0.018/GB/month; Cool costs approximately £0.010/GB/month — a 44% saving. For 10 TB of data that represents around £80/month saved, or nearly £1,000/year, just by moving blobs you access fewer than 18–20 times per month. The break-even point between Hot and Cool is roughly 18–20 access days per month: access your data more frequently than that, and Hot is cheaper; access it less often, and Cool wins.

Archive is a different trap entirely. It is roughly 20× cheaper per GB than Hot to store, but rehydration costs can erase years of savings in a single operation. If you restore a large Archive dataset more than once, you will almost certainly have paid more in retrieval fees than you would have spent keeping the data in Hot for 12 months. Archive makes economic sense only for data you are legally required to retain but virtually never need to read.

All prices below are sourced from the Azure Retail Prices API for UK South in GBP and are updated nightly. Early deletion penalties, operations charges, and redundancy costs are all included in the calculator above.

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The Four Access Tiers

Hot Tier

~£0.016/GB/month

Min retention:None

Operations:Cheapest

Retrieval:Free

Early deletion:None

›Highest storage cost, lowest access cost
›No minimum retention period
›Best for frequently accessed data, active application data, recently created files

Cool Tier

~£0.012/GB/month

Min retention:30 days

Operations:Higher than Hot

Retrieval:Charged per GB

Early deletion:Early deletion if removed before 30 days

›Lower storage cost than Hot
›Higher read/write operation costs
›Best for infrequent access, backups, DR data, older datasets

Cold Tier

~£0.004/GB/month

Min retention:90 days

Operations:Significant cost

Retrieval:Charged per GB

Early deletion:Early deletion if removed before 90 days

›Much lower storage cost
›Significant operation costs
›Best for rarely accessed compliance data, long-term backups

Archive Tier

~£0.001/GB/month

Min retention:180 days

Operations:Most expensive

Retrieval:Charged per GB + rehydration fee (takes hours)

Early deletion:Early deletion if removed before 180 days

›Cheapest storage — data is offline
›Must rehydrate before reading (takes hours)
›Best for data kept for compliance but almost never accessed

warning

Early deletion penalties: Moving data to a cooler tier then deleting it quickly can cost more than keeping it in Hot tier. Always model the full lifecycle cost before changing tiers on data you may delete soon.

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Redundancy Options

All four tiers are available with multiple redundancy levels. The redundancy option you choose affects price but not the tier billing model.

LRSLocally Redundant Storage

Copies:3 copies within one datacentre

Cost:Cheapest

Protection:Single datacentre failure loses data

Best for:Dev/test, data you can recreate

ZRSZone Redundant Storage

Copies:3 copies across 3 availability zones

Cost:~25% more than LRS

Protection:Protects against datacentre failure

Best for:Production workloads needing high availability

GRSGeo-Redundant Storage

Copies:6 copies — 3 in UK South, 3 in UK West

Cost:~2× more than LRS

Protection:Protects against regional failure

Best for:Disaster recovery requirements

RA-GRSRead-Access Geo-Redundant Storage

Copies:Same as GRS — secondary is also readable

Cost:Most expensive standard option

Protection:Full regional failure protection

Best for:Compliance requiring readable secondary, global reads

For most UK production workloads ZRS is the right choice — it protects against datacentre-level failure without the cost of geo-replication. LRS is rarely appropriate for anything business-critical.

Operations Pricing

Operations are charged separately from storage, per 10,000 requests. The cost per operation increases as you move to cooler tiers — this is the mechanism that makes Archive tier cheap to store but expensive to access.

Operation	Hot	Cool	Cold	Archive
Write (per 10k)	Cheapest	Higher	Higher still	Most expensive
Read (per 10k)	Cheapest	Higher	Higher still	Most expensive
Data retrieval	Free	Charged/GB	Charged/GB	Charged/GB + rehydration
Rehydration fee	N/A	N/A	N/A	Applies

For read-heavy workloads (CDN origin, media serving, application assets): Hot tier is almost always the cheapest total cost once you factor in read operation and retrieval charges.

For write-heavy workloads with infrequent reads (logs, backups, event archives): Cool or Cold may save significant money. Always calculate total cost including operations, not just storage.

Point-in-time Restore (PITR)

Point-in-time Restore (PITR) lets you restore a container or individual blobs to a previous state within a configurable retention window. It is useful for compliance requirements and protection against accidental deletion or corruption.

PITR requires enabling blob versioning, soft delete, and change feed on your storage account — all three add cost. Change feed is charged per event logged, which adds up quickly for high-churn storage accounts. Restore itself is charged per GB restored. Model these costs before enabling PITR on high-volume accounts.