Azure Storage Gets Minimum Billing Size

Microsoft is rolling out minimum billable object sizes for some tiers of Blob Storage. Blob Storage is available in a range of access tiers, enabling customers to pay less for storage that’s infrequently accessed. Under the new policy, objects in cool, cold, and archive tiers smaller than 128KiB will be billed as 128KiB. Hot tier remains unaffected. 

The policy goes into effect for new storage accounts beginning July 1, 2026, and will be applied to all accounts on July 1, 2027. 

Given that storage is priced in cents per gigabyte and the minimum billable size is 128 kibibytes (roughly 131 kilobytes), the only customers likely to see significant impact are those storing very large numbers of very small files. Examples might include text-based configuration files, such as YAML or JSON, or small Web-optimized JPG files. In those cases, customers may find it more cost effective to use the hot tier, even though the hot tier is between 1.8x and 9x more expensive per byte than other tiers. Alternatively, they may consider packing multiple objects together prior to uploading.