How do I delete or terminate my Amazon EC2 resources?

Last updated: 2020-09-23

Amazon EC2 resources fall under a few general billing categories. To stop accruing charges for EC2 resources, delete or terminate all On-Demand EC2 resources in all AWS Regions.

You can use the AWSSupport-ListEC2Resources AWS Systems Manager Automation document to list your active EC2 resources. This automation document returns information on EC2 instances and related resources, such as Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, Elastic IP addresses, and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups from the AWS Regions that you specify. By default, the information is gathered from all Regions and displayed in the output. To run this automation, follow the instructions in Running a simple automation. 

With the output of the automation document, do the following in respective AWS Regions:

• Delete your Auto Scaling infrastructure.
• Stop or terminate all your EC2 instances and load balancers.
  Note: EC2 instances are visible in the console for a short time after they're terminated. You aren't billed for any instances that aren't in the running state.
• Release all Dedicated Hosts.
• Delete all EBS volumes and EBS snapshots.
• Release all Elastic IP addresses.
• Deregister all Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

In addition, terminate all Elastic Beanstalk environments.

Note: Deleted, terminated, or released resources can't be recovered.

Most AWS customers use only a few of these resources in one or two Regions. To see the Regions that have active resources, check your monthly bill in the Billing and Cost Management console.

Note: Reserved Instances are billed as a flat fee each month. The fee is determined by the contract that you agreed to when you activated the Reserved Instance. Reserved Instances can't be canceled, but if you have a US bank account, you can list them for sale on the Reserved Instance Marketplace.

The following EC2-related resources don't generate charges when used or provisioned to an account:

• Virtual private clouds (VPCs)
• Security groups
• Key pairs
• Elastic network interfaces (ENIs)
• Auto Scaling groups

Note: Amazon Lightsail and EC2 are separate services and are billed separately. For more information about Lightsail, see Lightsail docs.