How do I delete or terminate Amazon RDS resources?

Resolution

There are three main resources in Amazon RDS that incur billing charges: DB instances, DB clusters, and snapshots. To get a list of these resources that are active on your account, run the following commands in the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI):

aws rds describe-db-instances
aws rds describe-db-clusters
aws rds describe-db-snapshots
aws rds describe-db-cluster-snapshots

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

• Delete all RDS DB instances.
• Delete Amazon Aurora clusters, if you have any.
• Delete all snapshots.

For RDS DB instances and Aurora DB clusters, make sure that the delete protection feature is turned off. Otherwise, you can't delete these resources. For more information, see How can I troubleshoot an error that I received when deleting an Amazon Aurora cluster?

Automated Backups can also incur charges. Unlike manual snapshots that must be deleted manually, automated backups persist only for the specified retention period. This retention period applies when you delete the DB instance. To delete your backups manually, see Deleting retained automated backups. Note that after backups are deleted, you can't recover their data.

If you purchased reserved DB instances, then those instances are billed according to contract that you agreed to when you purchased the instance.

If you delete the Amazon RDS resources mentioned earlier but you still see charges on your monthly bill, review your AWS Billing console dashboard.

Related information

Amazon RDS pricing