Data Residency & Regional Pricing

Regional processing — answering a request from infrastructure in a chosen geography for data-residency reasons — costs more than the same request processed globally, and since September it can also cost you a speed tier.

What the uplift covers

It is the same model, constrained to a region, billed at a flat 10% above the ordinary rate for models released on or after the published eligibility date. FedRAMP endpoints carry the same uplift. Older models aren't eligible for regional processing at all, so the uplift never silently applies to them.

A cheaper way to opt in

Since August, a single request can use regional processing through a prefixed domain, using a key from a project with Global geography — you no longer need a dedicated region-specific project to process one sensitive request in-region. The eligibility and retention requirements still apply.

What residency rules out

This is the part cost models miss. Fast mode isn't available with EU data residency on GPT-6 Astra or GPT-6 Sol, so an EU-resident workload on either has to plan around Standard instead. It is available with EU residency on GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6.1 Terra and GPT-6 Luna — OpenAI's earlier list excluded every GPT-6 model, and narrowed in October 2026. The models themselves stay available either way: GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6.1 Terra, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna support EU data residency with Standard, Flex and Batch processing, so the restriction is about speed, not about which model you can run, and the two GPT-6.1 models support only US and EU residency. Ultrafast splits by model too: GPT-6.1 Sol's supports US and EU data residency and global processing, GPT-6 Astra's only US data residency and global processing. In Codex the same split applies to inference residency — the United States and Europe for GPT-6.1 Sol's Ultrafast, the United States only for Astra's.

Why this is easy to miss

Residency usually arrives late — a compliance review, a customer contract — after the budget was built on global prices. Add the uplift explicitly at that point, and re-check whether the tier you planned on still exists for your region.

The tables above show the uplift and the tier restrictions.