We recommend Savings Plans (over Reserved Instances). Like Reserved Instances, Savings Plans offer lower prices (up to 72% savings compared to On-Demand Instance pricing). In addition, Savings Plans offer you the flexibility to change your usage as your needs evolve. For example, with Compute Savings Plans, lower prices will automatically apply when you change from C4 to C6g instances, shift a workload from EU (Ireland) to EU (London), or move a workload from Amazon EC2 to AWS Fargate or AWS Lambda.

Reserved Instances Purchase Options

Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand Instance pricing. In addition, when Reserved Instances are assigned to a specific Availability Zone, they provide a capacity reservation, giving you additional confidence in your ability to launch instances when you need them.

Standard and Convertible Reserved Instances Pricing

Standard Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand Instance pricing, and can be purchased for a 1-year or 3-year term. Customers have the flexibility to change the Availability Zone, the instance size, and networking type of their Standard Reserved Instances.

Purchase Convertible Reserved Instances if you need additional flexibility, such as the ability to use different instance families, operating systems, or tenancies over the Reserved Instance term. Convertible Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 66%) compared to On-Demand Instances and can be purchased for a 1-year or 3-year term.

Reserved Instances Payment Options

You can choose between three payment options when you purchase a Standard or Convertible Reserved Instance. With the All Upfront option, you pay for the entire Reserved Instance term with one upfront payment. This option provides you with the largest discount compared to On-Demand Instance pricing. With the Partial Upfront option, you make a low upfront payment and are then charged a discounted hourly rate for the instance for the duration of the Reserved Instance term. The No Upfront option does not require any upfront payment and provides a discounted hourly rate for the duration of the term.

Notice: Red Hat is making an update to their cloud pricing model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). On April 1, 2024 pricing for EC2 RHEL will change to a per-vCPU-hour based pricing model. Learn about the new prices in the RHEL on AWS Pricing page.

  • Standard Reserved Instances for Amazon EC2
  • Convertible Reserved Instances for Amazon EC2

Note: For T4g instances in Unlimited mode, CPU Credits are charged at $0.04 per vCPU-Hour for Linux, RHEL and SLES.

For T2 and T3 Unlimited instances, CPU Credits are charged at:

  • $0.05 per vCPU-Hour for Linux, RHEL and SLES, and
  • $0.096 per vCPU-Hour for Windows and Windows with SQL Web

The CPU Credit pricing is the same for all instance sizes, for On-Demand, Spot, and Reserved Instances, and across all regions.

See Unlimited mode for burstable performance instances for details on when CPU Credits are charged.

*This is the average monthly payment over the course of the Reserved Instance term. For each month, the actual monthly payment will equal the actual number of hours in that month multiplied by the hourly usage rate or number of seconds in that month multiplied by the hourly usage rate divided by 3600, depending on the EC2 instance type you run. The hourly usage rate is equivalent to the total average monthly payments over the term of the Reserved Instance divided by the total number of hours (based on a 365 day year) over the term of the Reserved Instance.

**Effective hourly pricing is shown to help you calculate the amount of money that a Reserved Instance will save you over On-Demand pricing. When you purchase a Reserved Instance, you are billed for every hour or second during the entire Reserved Instance term that you select, regardless of whether the instance is running or not. The effective hourly price shows the amortized hourly cost of the instance (this takes the total cost of the Reserved Instance over the entire term, including any upfront payment, and spreads it out over each hour of the Reserved Instance term).

Note: The Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) region only offers Reserved Instances and Spot Instances. On-Demand instance prices in the Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) region are for reference and only apply when Reserved Instances expire and are not renewed.

Amazon EC2 Standard Reserved Instance Volume Discounts

If you purchase a large number of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances in an AWS Region, you will automatically receive discounts on your upfront fees and hourly fees for future purchases of Standard Reserved Instances in that AWS Region. Reserved Instance tiers are determined based on the List Value (non-discounted total price) for the active Reserved Instances you have per AWS Region. A complete list of the Reserved Instance tiers is shown below:

Standard Reserved Instance Volume Discounts

Total Reserved Instances

Upfront Discount

Hourly Discount

Less than $500,000

0%

0%

$500,000 to $4,000,000

5%

5%

$4,000,000 to $10,000,000

10%

10%

More than $10,000,000

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For example, as soon as you have aggregated active Reserved Instances with a List Value totaling more than $500,000 in a single AWS Region, you will automatically receive a 5% discount on both upfront and hourly fees for all future Standard Reserved Instance purchases in that AWS Region, and those discounts will continue to apply to new Standard Reserved Instances as long as you continue to qualify for the discount tier. For an in-depth example, please visit the EC2 Reserved Instances FAQ.

Please note that Reserved Instance purchases of Windows with SQL Server are not included in the computation of volume tier discounts. Also, due to the scale of Microsoft licensing fees, volume tier discounts are not available for Windows with SQL Server Reserved Instances. Reserved Instance Marketplace and Convertible Reserved Instance purchases do not qualify for the volume discount but the list value for these purchases will count towards your volume discount status.

To learn more about Reserved Instance tiers, see the Understanding Reserved Instance Tiers section of the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Scheduled Reserved Instances Prices

Purchasing Reserved Instances on a recurring schedule lets you pay for compute capacity by the hour and obtain a capacity reservation ahead of time for only the time periods you will need it.

See pricing »

Standard and Convertible RI Features

The following summarizes features of all RIs.

Provide a significant discount compared to running instances On-Demand.

  • Can apply to usage across all Availability Zones in an AWS region, or can provide a capacity reservation when assigned to a specific Availability Zone.
  • Are offered under three upfront payment options to provide you with payment flexibility at the point of purchase.
  • Can be shared between multiple accounts within a consolidated billing family.

RI Marketplace

Reserved Instance Marketplace allows other AWS customers to list their Standard RIs for sale. Third-party Standard RIs are no different from the Standard Reserved Instances purchased directly from AWS except they are often listed at lower prices and shorter terms. To learn more about how to buy a Standard Reserved Instance from AWS or from third-party sellers, visit the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances Getting Started page. Learn more »

How to Purchase Reserved Instances

Buying a Reserved Instance is easy. You can use either the AWS Management Console or API tools to complete your purchase. Learn more »

How Billing Works

Customers using both Reserved and On-Demand instances will have Reserved Instance rates applied first to minimize costs. You pay the low hourly usage fee for every hour in your Reserved Instance term (which means you’re charged the hourly fee regardless of whether any usage has occurred during an hour). When your total quantity of running instances during a given hour exceeds the number of applicable Reserved Instances you own, you will be charged the On-Demand rate.

For example, if you own three Reserved Instances with the same instance attributes and region (or Availability Zone if applicable), the billing system checks each hour to see how many total instances you have running that match those parameters. If it is three or less, you will be charged the Reserved Instance rate for each matching instance running that hour. If more than three are running, you will be charged the On-Demand rate for the additional instances.