How Much Does Twilio Voice Cost? Per-Minute Pricing Explained

Twilio voice pricing is metered per minute and varies based on call direction, the type of number involved, and whether you route calls over PSTN or SIP. For businesses running outbound campaigns or inbound contact centres, even small inefficiencies in call routing can translate to significant monthly overspend. This guide covers the full rate card for Twilio voice in 2026 and the add-on costs that are easy to miss.

Inbound and Outbound PSTN Rates

Inbound calls to local Twilio numbers in the US are billed at $0.0085 per minute, while inbound calls to toll-free numbers cost $0.022 per minute, making toll-free significantly more expensive for high-volume inbound operations. Outbound calls from Twilio to US landlines and mobile numbers are billed at $0.013 per minute. Calls that stay within Twilio, such as conference bridges and transfers between Twilio numbers, are billed at $0.002 per minute per leg. International outbound rates vary widely by destination, with calls to UK landlines at approximately $0.012 per minute and calls to many emerging markets exceeding $0.05 per minute.

SIP Trunking Rates

Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking offers substantially lower rates for businesses that route calls through their own SIP infrastructure or PBX. Inbound SIP calls are $0.004 per minute and outbound SIP to PSTN is $0.013 per minute in the US. Businesses running a SIP PBX on-premise or in the cloud can reduce their per-minute costs by routing inbound traffic through SIP rather than PSTN, effectively cutting inbound costs by more than 50 percent compared to local number inbound rates. The trade-off is the infrastructure and configuration overhead of maintaining a SIP environment, which requires expertise Twilio does not provide out of the box.

Recording, Transcription, and Intelligence Add-Ons

Call recording on Twilio is billed at $0.0025 per minute for recording storage, applied to every minute of audio stored regardless of whether it is ever played back. Transcription using Twilio's built-in service costs $0.05 per 15-second block, making it $0.20 per minute of transcription, which is expensive for high-volume recording. Twilio Voice Intelligence, which extracts structured data and insights from call recordings, is priced separately and is more cost-effective than transcribing every call for analysis purposes. Businesses recording 100,000 minutes per month pay $250 in recording fees before any transcription, a cost that is often omitted from initial VoIP budget estimates.

Conference and Queue Costs

Twilio conference rooms are billed per participant per minute at the standard outbound or inbound rate depending on how each participant joined. A three-person conference with all participants connecting via inbound calls costs three times the per-minute rate for the duration of the call. Queue hold time is also billed as active call minutes, meaning callers sitting in a queue waiting for an agent accrue charges even before an agent picks up. Businesses with long average queue times can significantly reduce costs by implementing callback functionality, which terminates the inbound leg and calls the customer back when an agent is available, billing only the outbound leg.

Conclusion

Voice costs on Twilio scale with volume in ways that are not obvious until your first large invoice arrives, particularly when recording, conferencing, and queue hold time are factored in. Book a free cost analysis with our team and we will identify where your voice configuration is costing more than it should.