Who is billed for BigQuery queries?

Question

I am still not clear on who is billed for BigQuery queries on my dataset. If I have shared my dataset with another user and the other user queries it, who pays for those queries? There was a similar thread a year ago but I still wasn't confident that I understood who pays in this case.

Answer 1

If you own a dataset, you are billed for storage of all of the tables in that dataset. You are also billed for any queries that you run. If another user runs queries against your tables, they are billed, not you.

All queries run in the context of a project, which controls billing. I may be member of multiple projects, but only one project will be billed. If you are using the BigQuery Web UI, the active project determines who gets billed for the query. If you are using the bq command line tool, the default project or the --project_id flag determines the billing project.