Why am I being charged for Amazon EC2 when all my instances were terminated?

 I've terminated all my Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, but the Billing and Cost Management console still shows that I'm being charged for EC2.

Resolution

Check the following common causes:

You incurred the charges earlier in the billing cycle

If you ran an EC2 instance at the beginning of the month but you stopped or terminated it later, then your bill will include charges for the time that the instance was running.

You terminated your instances, but you still have EC2 resources provisioned to your account

The Elastic Compute Cloud line item in your bill includes resources other than instances. EC2 instances are often used along with other EC2 resources, such as the following:

• Elastic IP addresses
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes

Expand the Elastic Compute Cloud line item in the Bills page to see your EC2 usage by resource. Then, open the Amazon EC2 console and terminate or delete any resources that you don't need.

Stopped instances don't incur charges, but Elastic IP addresses or EBS volumes attached to those instances do.

To disassociate an Elastic IP address from an instance, see Disassociating an Elastic IP address.

For information on releasing an unattached Elastic IP address, see Releasing an Elastic IP address.

To detach an EBS volume from an instance, see Detaching an Amazon EBS volume from a Linux instance.

To delete an EBS volume that you no longer need, see Deleting an Amazon EBS volume.

To delete an EBS snapshot that you no longer need, see Deleting an Amazon EBS snapshot.

You terminated your instances in one Region, but you have instances running in another Region

To check whether you have active EC2 instances in other Regions, do the following:

1. Open the Billing and Cost Management console.
2. Choose Bills in the navigation pane.
3. In the Bill details by service section, expand the Elastic Compute Cloud line item.
4. Check if you have active EC2 instances in other Regions.

After confirming the Regions where EC2 resources are incurring charges, do the following:

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console.
2. In the navigation bar, select the respective Region from the Region Selector.
3. Terminate or delete EC2 resources that you don't need.

New instances have launched on your account

Services such as Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS Elastic Beanstalk can launch instances automatically based on how you configured them. If you created Spot Instance requests or Spot Fleet requests, then Spot Instances are launched when a certain Spot bid price is met.

Check that service's documentation for more information on terminating these resources. If you're not sure which service or resource is launching instances on your account, then contact AWS Support for help.

You purchased a Reserved Instance

Reserved Instances are billed each month for each hour in a given month until the end of the Reserved Instance contract.

If you're no longer using an instance type, then modify any applicable Reserved Instances to sizes that suit your current use case. You can also sell your instance on the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace.