BigQuery customers pays for active storage and long-term storage.
- Active storage includes any table or Partitioned tables that has been modified in the last 90 days.
- Long-term storage includes any table or Partitioned tables that has not been modified for 90 consecutive days. The price of storage for that table automatically drops by approximately 50%. There is no difference in performance, durability, or availability between active and long-term storage.
- Metadata storage includes storage for logical and physical metadata for datasets, tables, partitions, models and functions stored in the BigQuery metastore.
References
Pricing | BigQuery: Cloud Data Warehouse. [Online]. Available at: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing#storage [Accessed 8 May 2025].