Azure Queue Storage
Microsoft's managed queue, billed per 10,000 operations with queued messages charged as stored data.
- Queues and background jobs
- Not documented
- Not documented
- Not documented
Who it suits.
Azure-resident systems that want a queue billed like storage — operations plus depth, no plan to choose and no capacity to provision.
Consider something else if…
Queued messages are billed as stored data, so a backlog costs money by the gigabyte-month, and there is no free allowance at all where SQS gives a million requests a month.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
What the documentation says.
Each value below links to the page it was read from, with the sentence it came from. Criteria Azure Queue Storage does not publish are not listed.
Pricing
Pricing model
Per 10,000 operations plus stored data, with the rate set by redundancy: LRS Class 1 operations are $0.004 per 10,000, ZRS and GRS cost more for the same call. There is no plan fee and no included allowance.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Azure Retail Prices API — Queues v2, eastus ↗
“"LRS Class 1 Operations", "10K", 0.004 [...] "ZRS Class 2 Operations", "10K", 0.004 [...] "GRS Class 1 Operations", "10K", 0.008”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
Queues
Included per month
None included — every operation is billed. Class 1 operations are $0.004 per 10,000 on LRS in East US, which is $0.40 per million, matching Amazon SQS's standard rate exactly.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Azure Retail Prices API — Queues v2, eastus ↗
“"productName": "Queues v2", "meterName": "LRS Class 1 Operations", "unitOfMeasure": "10K", "retailPrice": 0.004”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
Maximum message size
64 KB per message. A queue may hold millions of messages, bounded only by the storage account's capacity rather than a queue-level ceiling.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Introduction to Azure Queue Storage — Microsoft Learn ↗
“A queue message can be up to 64 KB in size. A queue may contain millions of messages, up to the total capacity limit of a storage account.”
Read 2026-09-06 · official docs
Message retention
Messages in the queue are billed as stored data at $0.045 per GB-month on LRS, rather than granted as a retention window. Azure charges for depth, not for time.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Azure Retail Prices API — Queues v2, eastus ↗
“"meterName": "LRS Data Stored", "unitOfMeasure": "1 GB/Month", "retailPrice": 0.045”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
Maximum delay
Time-to-live defaults to seven days and can be set to any positive number, or to -1 for a message that never expires — the only queue here with an unbounded option.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Introduction to Azure Queue Storage — Microsoft Learn ↗
“For version 2017-07-29 or later, the maximum time-to-live can be any positive number, or -1 indicating that the message doesn't expire. If this parameter is omitted, the default time-to-live is seven days.”
Read 2026-09-06 · official docs
When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.