How do I delete or terminate EC2 resources?

Issue

I want to reduce or eliminate the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) resources associated with my AWS account. What resources are associated with the EC2 service, and how do I delete them?

Short Description

To stop all Amazon EC2-related charges for an account, do the following in all AWS Regions:

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.

Resolution

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.

The following EC2-related resources might generate on-demand charges when used or provisioned to an account:

  • Instances
  • EBS volumes
  • Data transfer
  • Elastic IP addresses that aren't associated with an EC2 instance
  • Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
  • Load balancers

Note: Reserved Instances are billed as a flat fee each month, according to the terms of the Reserved Instance contract 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 use similar terminology, but they are separate services and are billed separately. For more information about Lightsail, see Lightsail docs.

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

Why can't I find an EC2 instance on my account?

I'm receiving a bill, but can't find the resources related to the charges

Why am I being billed for Elastic IP addresses when all my instances are terminated?

I unintentionally incurred charges while using the Free Tier—how do I make sure I'm not billed again?

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Published: 2017-04-26

Updated: 2018-11-05