How much does an Equinix cross connect cost?
A fiber cross connect at Equinix costs $282.12 a month plus $400 to install on Equinix's published federal price list. Copper is $197.48 a month. Equinix publishes no commercial cross connect price, so this federal rate is the published benchmark, and a commercial quote is set in the contract.
| Charge | Price |
|---|---|
| Fiber cross connect, monthly | $282.12/mo |
| Copper cross connect (COAX or UTP), monthly | $197.48/mo |
| Installation, each | $400 one time |
| Removal, each | $246.85 one time |
| Between your own cages | $400 install, no monthly charge |
Source: Equinix, Inc. GSA schedule, contract GS-35F-401BA, price list generated November 7, 2025, retrieved September 28, 2026 (see the full price list below). Billing rules are in Equinix cross connect pricing.
Read your Equinix quote line by line
| Charge | What to compare | What the public data tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Cabinet | Monthly charge, cabinet count and services included | Equinix's federal price list gives space by IBX and kVA band; reported revenue per cabinet gives the commercial average |
| Power | Draw cap, units, A/B feeds and overage terms | The billing rules explain the cap; confirm the contracted allowance and price |
| Cross-connects | Quantity, connection type, monthly charges and installation fees | Federal price list: $282.12 a month for fiber, $197.48 for copper, $400 to install |
| Support and setup | Smart Hands rates, minimums and all one-time charges | Federal price list: $161.21 Smart Hands usage, $906.80 cabinet install in most flagship IBXs |
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Equinix's own published price list, the GSA schedule
Equinix does publish prices in one place. It holds a federal supply schedule with the U.S. General Services Administration, contract GS-35F-401BA, and GSA posts the full price list for anyone to download. It is Equinix's own paper, not a reseller's. It prices cross connects, cabinets by IBX and power band, power per kVA, install fees, Smart Hands, Fabric and Metro Connect.
| Line item, as Equinix titles it | Where it applies | Price |
|---|---|---|
| MRC Cross Connects Fiber | All listed IBXs | $282.12/month |
| MRC Cross Connects COAX, or UTP | All listed IBXs | $197.48/month |
| MRC Cross Connects POTS | All listed IBXs | $20.14/month |
| NRC Cross Connects, fiber, COAX, UTP or POTS | All listed IBXs | $400 one-time |
| NRC Intra-Customer Cross Connect | All listed IBXs, no monthly charge | $400 one-time |
| NRC Cross Connects Deinstall fee | All listed IBXs | $246.85 one-time |
| MRC Secure Cabinet, Space (up to 2.99 / 4.99 / 7.99 kVA) | DC2 Ashburn, DA1 Dallas, LA1, MI1, NY4 | $798.02 / $1,329.95 / $2,324.99 a month |
| MRC Secure Cabinet, Space (up to 2.99 / 4.99 / 7.99 kVA) | CH1, CH2 Chicago, SV1 Silicon Valley | $964.27 / $1,607.11 / $2,673.40 a month |
| MRC Private Cage or Secure Cabinet, AC Power (1kVA) | DC2, DA1, LA1, NY4 | $272.05 per kVA a month |
| MRC Private Cage or Secure Cabinet, AC Power (1kVA) | CH1, CH2, SV1 | $328.72 per kVA a month |
| NRC Cabinet Install Fee | DC2, CH1, SV1, LA1, MI1 and others | $906.80 one-time |
| NRC Smart Hands Usage Based, and after hours | All listed IBXs | $161.21 / $181.36 per unit |
| MRC Equinix Fabric Local Virtual Connection, 1GB / 10GB | All IBXs | $161.21 / $425.19 a month |
| MRC Metro Connect, 1 Gb protected | Between IBXs in one metro | $400/month |
Source: GSA eLibrary, Equinix, Inc., contract GS-35F-401BA, price list spreadsheet, generated November 7, 2025, contract year 12 (June 11, 2025 to June 10, 2026), retrieved September 28, 2026. Prices are the GSA price including the 0.75% industrial funding fee. The per-year price columns are all blank; the only populated column is the price as of the generation date, so read these as November 2025 figures rather than a confirmed 2026 rate. The fiber cross connect was also $282.12 on the February 2019 version of the same list, attached to Arlington County, Virginia's contract renewal with Equinix. Smart Hands is priced per unit; the list does not say the unit is an hour.
These are rates Equinix agreed with the U.S. government, dated November 2025. A commercial quote can land above or below them, and nothing in the list says which. It is still the only place Equinix puts its own number on a cross connect, which makes it worth having open when the quote arrives.
The list prices a cabinet two ways, and it does not say which applies to a given order. One model bills space and power as separate items: at Ashburn DC2, "MRC Secure Cabinet, Space (up to 4.99kVA)" at $1,329.95 plus "AC Power (1kVA)" at $272.05 per kVA, which at 4 kVA comes to about $2,418 a month. The other is a single bundled item, "Private Cage or Secure Cabinet with Power", at $655.59 per kVA a month at DC2 with a 2.5 kVA minimum, which at 4 kVA is about $2,622. Both are arithmetic on the list, not a DC2 cabinet price, and both sit between the $1,969 of space and power Equinix earns per average Americas cabinet and the $2,743 all-in average below.
What an Equinix cabinet actually costs
Equinix reports monthly recurring revenue per billed cabinet every quarter, by region, in its earnings materials. It is the best public measure of what commercial customers pay, and it has a property no rate card has: it is what customers actually pay, after whatever they negotiated, averaged across the whole installed base.
| Region | MRR per billed cabinet, Q2 2026 | Same quarter, 2025 | Cabinets billing | Utilization |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Americas | $2,743/cabinet-mo | $2,570 | 127,600 | 81% |
| EMEA | $2,401/cabinet-mo | $2,223 | 110,000 | 78% |
| Asia-Pacific | $2,379/cabinet-mo | $2,269 | 70,000 | 73% |
| Worldwide | $2,538/cabinet-mo | $2,376 | 307,600 | 78% |
Source: Equinix Q2 2026 earnings presentation, non-financial metrics, published July 29, 2026. Equinix defines MRR per cabinet as the quarter's recurring revenues divided by three, over the average of cabinets billing at the start and end of the quarter, excluding xScale joint venture revenue, Equinix Metal, Infomart non-IBX tenant income and two recent acquisitions.
This figure carries a one-cabinet customer in a secondary metro and a two-hundred-cabinet customer in Ashburn inside the same number, and it includes interconnection revenue, which a rate card would not. It is the right benchmark for asking "is my quote normal", and the wrong number to quote back as though it were a list price.
Roughly a quarter of that bill is not space and power
Equinix reports revenue by service line and by region in the same filing, which makes the cabinet number separable. Divide each Americas service line by the same average cabinet count and the composition falls out.
| Americas service line | Q2 2026 revenue | Per billed cabinet per month | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Colocation, meaning space and power | $747M | about $1,969 | 70% |
| Interconnection | $256M | about $675 | 24% |
| Managed infrastructure | $56M | about $148 | 5% |
| Other | $8M | about $21 | 1% |
Revenue by service is from Equinix's Q2 2026 results, filed with the SEC on Form 8-K, exhibit 99.1, July 29, 2026. The per-cabinet column is ours, calculated as quarterly revenue divided by three over 126,450 cabinets, the average of 125,300 at March 31 and 127,600 at June 30. Those four lines sum to $2,813 against the $2,743 Equinix reports, because Equinix's own measure strips out Equinix Metal and Infomart non-IBX tenant income and this arithmetic does not.
The useful consequence: a shortlist compared on cabinet rate alone is comparing about 70% of an Equinix bill. Interconnection is not a rounding error at Equinix, it is the reason the platform is worth a premium, and it is the part a buyer most often forgets to price.
Equinix does not publish the average power sold per cabinet, so nobody can turn $1,969 into a rate per kW honestly without saying what they assumed. On a 4 kVA draw cap, which is a standard Equinix cabinet rating, $1,969 of space and power is about $492 per kVA per month. On a 5 kVA cap it is about $394. Both sit above the $293 per kW that Digital Realty reported for sub-megawatt deployments in the same quarter, which is what you would expect: retail cabinets in a dense interconnection building are the expensive end of the market. See the retail versus wholesale spread for why.
What we see in real quotes. Quotes we reviewed in October 2026 for private cage deployments ran $215 to $298 per kW per month for space, committed power, cross-connects, remote hands and one-time costs, counted over the term. Providers and buyers are not named. Send us your quote and we will tell you where it sits.
The power that comes with the cabinet, and how it is counted
This part Equinix does publish, in detail, and it is worth reading before a quote arrives. Equinix sells a draw cap measured in kVA, not a circuit count and not kW. The cap applies to the total load across every circuit in the deployment at any one moment.
| Cabinet rating | Circuit, 120/208V | Usable power | Circuit, 240/415V | Usable power |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 to 3 kVA | 120V 30A single phase | 2.88 kVA | 240V 20A single phase | 4.79 kVA |
| 4 kVA | 208V 30A single phase | 4.99 kVA | 240V 20A single phase | 4.79 kVA |
| 5 to 6 kVA | Not offered | — | 240V 32A single phase | 7.67 kVA |
| 7 to 8 kVA | Not offered | — | 240V 40A single phase | 9.58 kVA |
| 9 to 12 kVA | Not offered | — | 415V 20A three phase | 14.38 kVA |
| 13 to 20 kVA, non-standard | Not offered | — | 415V 32A three phase | 23 kVA |
Source: Equinix Product Documentation, Colocation, Power, retrieved August 31, 2026. The largest non-standard circuit Equinix lists for the Americas is 415V 63A three phase at 45.28 kVA usable.
Three rules in that document decide whether a quote does what a buyer thinks it does.
- In the Americas a 120/208V circuit is derated to 80% of its breaker size. On 240/415V circuits, and everywhere in EMEA and Asia-Pacific, the full breaker size is allowed. A 30 amp circuit is therefore not the same amount of power in Ashburn as in Amsterdam.
- Circuits are installed in primary and redundant pairs, and the pair may carry up to twice the draw cap. The installed capacity in the cabinet will look larger than what the contract permits you to draw. It is the cap that is billed and the cap that is enforced.
- The cap is in kVA and Equinix supports load to it whatever your power factor is. Equipment at a 0.9 power factor turns a 4 kVA cap into roughly 3.6 kW of real work, so a kW requirement has to be converted upward before it becomes a kVA order.
Overage in the published resale terms: twice the contract rate
Published Equinix colocation terms, in the service guides Verizon files for the Equinix service it resells, are explicit and unusually harsh compared with the industry's ordinary "premium" language. Exceed the draw cap and you have 72 hours to get back under it. After that the reseller may either charge the overage at twice the then-current monthly recurring charge per kVA for space and power, or suspend your power until compliance is restored. Those remedies are Verizon's under its resale contract; Equinix's own documentation confirms the draw cap but does not publish a penalty rate, so confirm the overage term in a direct Equinix proposal.
| Published term | What it says |
|---|---|
| Draw cap | Customer may not draw more power than the kVA or kW on the order |
| Cure period | 72 hours from notice, or as otherwise agreed |
| Overage charge | 2x the then-current MRC per kVA |
| Alternative remedy | Suspension of power to force compliance |
| Annual increase | At least 3% every 12 months |
| Power cost pass-through | If electricity cost rises more than 3%, power charges may rise by that full amount |
| Early termination | 100% of remaining monthly charges |
| Renewal | Automatic one-year renewals unless cancelled 120 days before expiry |
Sources: Verizon Business service guides Equinix Colocation Resale and Colocation, Equinix Data Centers, revision 20200210_04, copyright line 2019 to 2024, both retrieved August 31, 2026. Both documents state the draw cap and the 2x overage in the same words. Read these as resale terms, not as Equinix's own paper. Verizon is reselling Equinix space, so the 3% escalator and the termination charge are Verizon's commercial terms; the draw cap mechanic and the 2x overage describe the underlying Equinix product and are corroborated by Equinix's own draw cap documentation. Equinix does not publish its direct customer agreement.
A deployment sized to its cap with no headroom is one firmware update away from paying double on the excess. The negotiation that pays for itself is not ten dollars off the cabinet, it is the right to step the cap up mid-term at a price agreed on day one. Ask for the step-up schedule in the contract, not in an email.
Equinix cross connect pricing: $282.12 a month for fiber on the GSA schedule
Equinix's federal price list puts a fiber cross connect at $282.12 a month and a copper one, COAX or UTP, at $197.48. Each costs $400 to install and $246.85 to remove. A cross connect between your own cages costs the $400 install and nothing monthly. Equinix's product documentation sets out how those charges apply.
| Connection type | How it is charged |
|---|---|
| Standard, campus, diverse campus and extended cross connects | Monthly charge plus a one-time install charge |
| Intra-customer cross connects, between your own cages | Install charge only, no monthly charge |
| Intra-facility cabling and private patch panels | Install charge only, no monthly charge |
| Extended demarcation | Monthly charge plus install charge |
| Innerduct | Varies by region |
| Early termination of a cross connect | A one-time deinstallation fee |
Source: Equinix Product Documentation, Cross Connect, Pricing and Billing, retrieved August 31, 2026. Cross connect term commitments follow the colocation terms. In EMEA the intra-facility cabling rule can invert: pre-integration assets often carry the monthly charge and the cross connect does not.
For scale rather than for price, Equinix's own disclosures bound the number. In the Americas it earned $256 million of interconnection revenue in Q2 2026 across an average of 235,050 interconnections, which is about $363 per interconnection per month. Worldwide the same arithmetic gives about $292.
Interconnection revenue is not only cross connects. It also carries Equinix Fabric ports, virtual connections and Equinix Internet Access, and an internet access port costs multiples of a fiber jumper. Cross connections were 449,100 of the 522,700 interconnections in service worldwide, so physical cross connects dominate the count while the expensive products pull the average up. An average cannot set a maximum for any one product or contract. For what it is worth, the $282.12 fiber price on Equinix's own federal list falls under it.
Other providers publish federal cross connect prices too. Iron Mountain's GSA schedule prices a cross connect at $122.96 each, and the GSA EIS vehicle carries fiber cross connects from $44.46 to $688.22 a month depending on the vendor. Those are not like-for-like with the Equinix line, because each schedule scopes the service its own way. They are set out with their contract numbers on our public sector pricing page.
Equinix Internet Access: published billing examples with dollar amounts
Equinix's commercial documentation states a dollar figure in one place: its own internet service, Equinix Internet Access. The pricing page works its billing rules through examples, and the examples carry US dollar amounts. They show how a bill is built, not what any customer can buy at that price.
| Billing model | Equinix's example | Example amount |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed bandwidth | 10 Mbps commit, single or redundant connection | $150/month |
| Fixed bandwidth | 1 Gbps commit, on a 1 or 10 Gbps port | $1,000/month |
| Usage based | US, 100 Mbps | $350 minimum a month, plus $0.02 per GB |
| Burst | US, 100 Mbps commit | $348/month, plus $5.22 per Mbps above commit |
| Setup, early termination, deinstall | All three models | $0 |
Source: Equinix Product Documentation, Equinix Internet Access, Pricing and Billing, retrieved September 28, 2026. Equinix presents these as examples of how each billing model works, not as a rate card. Redundant connections cost the same as a single one, and the burst fee is 1.5 times the monthly charge divided by the commit. Bandwidth is billed separately from the port, the cross connect and the cabinet.
Smart Hands pricing: every billing rule published
Equinix's remote hands service is called Smart Hands. Its commercial documentation is unusually specific about mechanics and states no rate. The federal price list does: $161.21 per unit of usage, and $181.36 after hours at sites not staffed around the clock. The list's unit is "EA" with no duration given, so neither figure is a verified hourly rate. The commercial billing rules below are a separate matter.
- Billed hourly in 30-minute increments, with a 30-minute minimum. Within a single order you are only charged again once total logged time passes each 30-minute boundary, so four short tasks totalling 55 minutes bill as 60.
- After-hours work costs more, at IBX sites that are not staffed 24 hours.
- Power tasks are a fixed fee, not labour. Energizing or de-energizing a circuit bills at one quarter of the standard hourly rate per circuit, with no labour charge on top.
- Prepaid hours discount the rate by 5% to 40%, and scheduled rather than urgent work discounts it further. Urgent requests can carry an extra fixed charge.
- Billing is per cage. Work in two cages cannot share a ticket, which quietly doubles the minimum charge on a multi-cage deployment.
Source: Equinix Product Documentation, Smart Hands, Pricing and Invoices, retrieved August 31, 2026. The published federal comparator, again not an Equinix rate, is Iron Mountain's GSA remote hands line at $157.11 per hour for government fiscal year 2026.
What is actually negotiable, and what is not
Equinix's published material and its published performance answer this more usefully than any negotiation folklore.
Term length, on the express product: no
Equinix's own ordering documentation for Secure Cabinet Express says term runs from 24 to 60 months and that "your term length selection does not affect the pricing of the current order". Prices are then guaranteed for the term. On that product, trading years for a discount is wasted effort; on a negotiated cage deal it is not.
Prepaid Smart Hands hours: yes, and it is published
A 5% to 40% discount band is stated in Equinix's own documentation. That is the only discount range Equinix puts a number on anywhere, which makes it the easiest one to ask for by name.
The interconnection line: yes, structurally
Intra-customer cross connects carry no monthly charge. On Fabric, an Unlimited port includes unlimited local connections and Unlimited Plus adds free remote connections within the United States and Canada. Buying the right port package is a bigger lever than arguing per connection.
The headline cabinet rate: hardest right now
Americas utilization was 81% at quarter end, monthly recurring revenue churn was 1.8%, and Equinix attributes rising revenue per cabinet to "higher densities and firm pricing". A near-full building with almost no churn is not a building that discounts space.
Sources: Equinix Product Documentation, Ordering Secure Cabinet Express, Equinix Fabric Pricing and Billing and the Smart Hands page above, all retrieved August 31, 2026; utilization, churn and the pricing quotation from the Q2 2026 earnings presentation.
Two further published details are worth putting in a term sheet. Fabric standard ports are co-terminus with the colocation cage, so a port bought late in a term inherits the cage's end date rather than starting a new one. And Fabric terms auto-renew unless cancelled 90 days before the end, against 120 days on the colocation service in the resale terms above. Two different notice periods on one deployment is how an unwanted renewal happens.
How an Equinix quote is laid out, line by line
An Equinix proposal separates recurring charges from one-time charges on every line, and the published product documentation says which lines carry which. Knowing that before the quote arrives makes the two totals that matter, year one and full term, quick to build.
| Line | Monthly recurring (MRC) | One-time (NRC) | What to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cabinet or cage, space and power | Per kVA of draw cap, per IBX | Installation | The cap in kVA, the A and B feed arrangement, and the step-up schedule if you will need more power mid-term |
| Standard, campus or extended cross connect | Yes | Yes | Quantity at your real carrier and cloud count; both charges are unpublished, so both must be on the quote |
| Intra-customer cross connect, between your own cages | No | Yes | Make sure it is billed as intra-customer and not as a standard connection |
| Equinix Fabric port | Yes, package dependent | Varies | Co-terminus with the cage, and auto-renews on 90 days notice against 120 for the colocation service |
| Smart Hands | Prepaid hours, or billed as used | Per task, energizing a circuit at a quarter of the hourly rate | The hourly rate, the after-hours multiplier and the per-cage billing rule on multi-cage deployments |
| Escalation | At least 3% a year in published resale terms | Not applicable | Whether a power cost pass-through sits on top of the fixed increase |
Two totals, then. Year one is every MRC times twelve plus every NRC. Full term is the MRCs compounded at the escalator across the term, plus the NRCs once, plus the exit. The published resale terms put early termination at 100% of the remaining monthly charges, so the exit line is the full remaining term unless the quote says otherwise. The terms MRC, NRC, kVA and usable kW are defined on the pricing glossary.
Renting Equinix's cabinet against bringing your own
Equinix's cabinet products supply the enclosure as part of the service, which is why the per-cabinet revenue figure at the top of this page carries the cabinet inside it. In a private cage the racks are generally yours to supply, which moves the cabinet from a recurring line to a one-time cost and makes it yours to take away at the end. Three things to confirm against the product documentation for your IBX before deciding: whether the cabinet is inside the MRC or quoted as an NRC, what dimensions, weight and cable management the site will accept for customer-supplied racks, and who removes them and restores the floor at exit.
Equinix pricing outside the United States
The regional figures at the top of this page are the only published Equinix numbers that vary by geography, and the gap is smaller than most buyers expect: Americas $2,743, EMEA $2,401 and Asia-Pacific $2,379 per billed cabinet per month in Q2 2026. Equinix publishes nothing by metro. A buyer pricing Mexico City, Frankfurt or Singapore is inside a regional average that also contains the cheapest secondary market in the region.
The nearest published market figures are CBRE's asking rents, which price a 250 to 500 kW requirement rather than a cabinet and are not Equinix rates. For Mexico the published band is Querétaro at $250 to $270 per kW per month; Mexico City itself has no published band. Frankfurt is $235 to $265, Singapore $330 to $475, Tokyo about $280 and Sydney about $188, all Q1 2026 and all set out with their sources on the colocation pricing page. One Equinix rule does change at the border: outside the Americas, and on 240/415V circuits everywhere, the full breaker size is allowed rather than 80% of it, so the same circuit delivers more usable power in Amsterdam than in Ashburn. The power table above has the figures.
What Equinix does not publish, stated plainly
Everything above exists because we could source it. These we could not, and no number should be invented to fill them.
- No commercial rate card. Apart from the Internet Access examples, the only published Equinix prices are the federal ones above. Equinix's portal shows commercial rates per IBX only to a logged-in customer, and the reseller rate cards that circulate online are confidential documents rather than published ones.
- No commercial cross connect price. The $282.12 is the federal rate. What a commercial customer pays is set in the quote.
- No stated unit for Smart Hands. The federal list prices Smart Hands per unit and never says the unit is an hour.
- No commercial Fabric port price. The federal list prices virtual connections. Commercial Fabric pricing sits behind a login and a pricing tool.
- No direct customer agreement. The contract terms quoted on this page come from Verizon's published resale service guides. Equinix's own master agreement is not public, so the escalator and termination terms an Equinix direct customer signs may differ from the ones above.
- No average power per cabinet. Which is why the per kVA figures on this page are labelled as illustrations against a stated cabinet rating rather than presented as a rate.
If you have an Equinix quote in hand, the fastest way to know whether it is normal is to compare each line against the federal price list, then the cabinet total against the $2,743 Americas average, then check what share of the total the interconnection lines represent. For everything outside Equinix, see the colocation pricing guide and the market benchmarks.