Snowflake warehouse size is the one setting that decides how fast your credits burn. An X-Small warehouse uses 1 credit an hour. Each size up doubles that, all the way to 512 credits an hour for a 6X-Large. Most people learn this from the first bill.
But size is only half of the sum. The other half is how many hours the warehouse is awake, and that is where most Snowflake bills go wrong. This post gives you the full size table, what a credit costs, worked monthly figures, and a way to check your own account before you change anything.
A note on sources. I have no live Snowflake account to write this from. Every rate below is from Snowflake's own documentation or its Service Consumption Table, the version effective 30 September 2026, which I read on 1 October 2026. Prices change, and contracts differ. Check the current table and your order form.
Snowflake warehouse sizes and credits per hour
From Snowflake's warehouse overview, for a standard Gen1 warehouse:
| Size | Credits / hour | At $3.00 / credit |
|---|---|---|
| X-Small | 1 | $3 / hr |
| Small | 2 | $6 / hr |
| Medium | 4 | $12 / hr |
| Large | 8 | $24 / hr |
| X-Large | 16 | $48 / hr |
| 2X-Large | 32 | $96 / hr |
| 3X-Large | 64 | $192 / hr |
| 4X-Large | 128 | $384 / hr |
| 5X-Large | 256 | $768 / hr |
| 6X-Large | 512 | $1,536 / hr |
The $3.00 column is the Enterprise on-demand list price in AWS US East, used here only so the doubling is easy to see.
Three billing rules sit under that table:
- Per second, with a 60-second minimum each time the warehouse starts or resumes. A 5-second query that wakes a warehouse bills a full minute.
- Suspended warehouses use no credits. The meter runs while the warehouse is awake, not while queries run.
- 5X-Large and 6X-Large are not in every region. The consumption table says they "may not be GA in all Regions".
Gen2 warehouses cost more per hour
This one catches people out. Snowflake's Gen2 documentation says that if you create a standard warehouse without a GENERATION clause, you get Gen2, unless Gen2 is not available in your region. The consumption table prices Gen2 at a higher rate:
| Size | Gen1 | Gen2 on AWS / GCP | Gen2 on Azure |
|---|---|---|---|
| X-Small | 1 | 1.35 | 1.25 |
| Medium | 4 | 5.4 | 5 |
| Large | 8 | 10.8 | 10 |
Gen2 is meant to finish analytics and data engineering work faster, so per query it may cost less. I can't verify how much faster on your workload, and neither can a table. What I can say: if your bill moved and you did not change a size, check which generation your newer warehouses are on.
SHOW WAREHOUSES; -- the size, auto_suspend and generation columns are the ones to read
How much is a Snowflake credit in dollars?
It depends on four things: your edition, your cloud, your region, and whether you pay on demand or by capacity contract. Snowflake's pricing page does not print a single number for this reason. It points to the consumption table.
On-demand prices from the table effective 30 September 2026:
| Region | Standard | Enterprise | Business Critical |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS US East (N. Virginia) | $2.00 | $3.00 | $4.00 |
| AWS US West (Oregon) | $2.00 | $3.00 | $4.00 |
| AWS EU Dublin | $2.60 | $3.90 | $5.20 |
| AWS EU Frankfurt | $2.60 | $3.90 | $5.20 |
| AWS AP Sydney | $2.75 | $4.05 | $5.50 |
Capacity contracts, paid up front, can bring the price down. The discount is in your order form, not in any public table. If you are on capacity, use your contracted rate in every sum below.
There is one more line most people never see: cloud services. The table charges it at 4.4 credits an hour, but only for the part of a day's cloud services use that exceeds 10% of that day's warehouse credits. For most accounts it is zero or close to it. If it is not, something unusual is running: very many tiny queries, or heavy metadata work.
This is the first part. The full post — including the rest of the working details — is on my site: Snowflake warehouse sizes and what each one costs in credits
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