Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to lead the cloud infrastructure market with roughly 30% global market share as of 2025. To encourage more businesses to migrate their workloads to AWS, Amazon offers the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) — a structured initiative that combines financial credits, technical guidance, and best-practice methodologies to reduce the risk and cost of moving to the cloud.
Below we’ll cover the details of the program — including what changed with the 2024 overhaul — the financial benefits for companies looking to take part, and how to make sure you capture every credit available to you.
What Is AWS MAP?
AWS MAP (Migration Acceleration Program) is a program offered by Amazon to help businesses migrate their applications, infrastructure, and data — collectively known as workloads — to AWS quickly and efficiently. The program provides a proven methodology built from thousands of enterprise migrations, along with financial credits that offset the upfront cost of moving to the cloud.
The program includes a process for taking stock of your current workloads, estimating the financial gain of migrating those workloads, and for Amazon to provide funding in the form of financial credits and partner cash to help minimize migration risk.
Your migrated workloads are identified by AWS through a required tagging system, which allows Amazon to generate a cost and usage report (CUR). Using these tags and your CUR, Amazon determines whether or not you’re eligible for a credit to your account.
Research Report
FinOps In The AI Era: A Critical Recalibration
What 475 executives told us about AI and cloud efficiency.
How Does The AWS Migration Acceleration Program Work?
AWS MAP has three basic steps: determining whether or not you’re ready to migrate to AWS, getting your workloads ready to migrate, and completing the migration. These three phases are meant to reduce the complexity and costs of migration and improve your chances of success.
- Assess your readiness. This phase includes completion of a Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA), which evaluates your organization across six AWS Cloud Adoption Framework dimensions: business, process, people, platform, operations, and security. You’ll also build a total cost of ownership (TCO) model to confirm that migrating makes financial sense. Funding for this phase is typically 5% of the projected annual recurring revenue (ARR), delivered as partner cash or credits.
- Mobilize your resources. This phase focuses on closing capability gaps, developing a detailed migration plan, building a secure AWS Landing Zone, and training your teams. Funding for mobilization is typically 20% of post-migration ARR. Additional Strategic Partner Incentives (SPIs) may apply for VMware, greenfield, and modernization workloads.
- Migrate and modernize. This is where workloads are actually moved to AWS, using migration services like AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) and AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). Proper tagging is required at this stage to track eligible spending and receive MAP credits. Post-migration funding typically ranges from 15–25% of ARR in credits, with additional credits available for database, analytics, SAP, and Oracle workloads.
You can earn financial credits by properly tagging and migrating eligible workloads. This incentivizes businesses to migrate as many workloads as possible to AWS.
What Changed With MAP 2.0
In July 2024, AWS overhauled the MAP program with several changes that make it more accessible and more generous:
- Increased funding capacity. Businesses can now earn up to $2 million in partner funding, up from the previous cap of $460,000.
- Lowered entry requirements. MAP Lite is now available for businesses with a minimum of $100,000 in ARR, down from the previous $250,000 minimum. This opens the program to mid-market organizations that were previously excluded.
- Simplified approvals. The approval process has been consolidated into a single AWS Business Approval, and the previous requirement for 1:1 customer matching has been eliminated.
These changes mean more companies qualify, the financial upside is larger, and the administrative overhead is lower. If your organization previously considered MAP but found the barriers too high, the updated program structure is worth re-evaluating.
Why Should Companies Care About The AWS MAP Program?
Businesses should care about the AWS MAP program because it directly addresses two of the biggest barriers to cloud migration: cost and risk. As demand for your applications grows, so will your infrastructure costs.
If you’re managing your systems on-premise, you’ll have to regularly make infrastructure investments to manage that demand:
But, in reality, demand isn’t always stable. Sometimes, you have less demand than you can manage, which leaves you with an opportunity cost. Sometimes, you might unexpectedly have more demand than you can manage, which may require you to postpone new projects or close your door to new customers temporarily:
The goal is for supply and demand to be as close as possible, so that you’re never paying for more resources than you need, and so that you can handle unexpected demand when it happens.
When you work with AWS, you pay for what you use. MAP adds another layer of financial benefit by providing credits that reduce your effective migration cost, funding migration planning activities (not just the migration itself), and giving you access to AWS expertise that reduces the risk of failed cutovers, overspending, or technical debt. For companies pursuing cloud cost optimization, MAP provides a structured on-ramp.
How To Get The Biggest Possible Financial Gain From The AWS MAP Program
MAP provides three categories of financial benefit: reduced infrastructure costs through cloud economics, funded migration planning and execution, and credit-based savings on migrated workloads. The third category — credits — is the one most often left on the table, because it depends entirely on whether your workloads are tagged correctly before migration. AWS will not retroactively apply credits.
To realize the biggest possible financial gain, you need to make sure everything is tagged properly before it’s migrated.
But in reality, it’s almost never that simple.
There are typically two main personas involved in an AWS migration: One is an executive or financial professional who entered into the agreement and has an expectation for a certain amount of credit. Then, there’s the technical professional who wasn’t involved in the agreement process, but was told they need to ensure everything is tagged.
If those two personas aren’t working together in lockstep to ensure both parties understand the benefit to the business, workloads can get migrated without being tagged properly, and the potential for credits are often missed.
To make sure your business isn’t a victim of this common mistake, there are three things you can do:
1. Know what workloads are eligible for credit and whether or not they’re tagged
The hardest part of AWS MAP can be simply having visibility into what’s eligible to receive a financial credit, and whether or not assets are tagged properly. For a full picture, you need to know:
- Which workloads are eligible for credit
- Which workloads are not eligible for credit
- Of those eligible workloads, how many are tagged
- Of those eligible workloads, how many are not tagged
- Of those workloads not tagged, which are the most important to tackle first
CloudZero provides businesses with a real-time view of which workloads are tagged and which are not, ensuring you never miss out on an AWS MAP credit because of a tagging oversight.
The platform automatically prioritizes workload tagging by associated cost, so you can tag your most expensive resources first and start receiving credit as quickly as possible.
Since AWS only applies credits to workloads tagged before migration, establishing a structured tagging approach is critical. Use AWS Cost Allocation Tags to separate MAP-eligible costs from general spending, audit tags regularly, and ensure finance and engineering teams share a common tagging strategy.
2. Accurately predict the credits you’ll receive
AWS MAP extends credits on a quarterly basis, and only after you’ve migrated $50,000 worth of workloads. Finance teams need to accurately predict the credit they’ll receive.
The challenge is that AWS doesn’t provide upfront visibility into exactly how much credit you’ll receive — it depends on what you’ve actually tagged and migrated.
CloudZero’s MAP workload dashboard summarizes your tagged spend alongside your total AWS spend, giving you a reliable basis for estimating credits in any given period.
3. Understand how many credits you’ve received historically
Historical accounting capabilities — like being able to see how many credits you’ve received since being a part of AWS MAP or comparing the credits you’ve received quarter-to-quarter — are critical to ensure you meet your business’s financial expectations in any given period.
With CloudZero, you can compare your tagged MAP spend to your total AWS spend within any given time frame to see how much you’re saving. You can also drill down further into any account or service to see the cost and credit associated with an individual workload.
Without An Accurate Picture Of Your Workloads’ Tags, You’re Likely Missing Out On Credit You Deserve
Accurate visibility into the status of your AWS migration is critical for ensuring you receive the biggest financial gain. It’s easy for untagged workloads to fly under the radar for long periods of time without a system to identify them easily.
With CloudZero, you can see which eligible workloads haven’t been tagged, prioritize them by cost impact, and track your credit trajectory in real time. If you’re planning a migration or already participating in MAP, understanding your AWS migration strategy alongside your tagging status is the fastest path to maximizing your financial return.
to learn more about how CloudZero can support you while you’re a part of AWS MAP.
Software and pricing information last verified May 2026. Features, pricing, and availability may have changed. Please verify current details with AWS before making decisions.
FinOps In The AI Era: A Critical Recalibration
What 475 executives told us about AI and cloud efficiency.
