Why am I charged for Amazon EBS when all my instances are stopped?

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I stopped all my Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, but I still receive charges for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage.

Resolution

Amazon EBS charges you for the amount of storage that's provisioned to your account, measured in gigabyte-months. Amazon EC2 instances accrue charges only when they're running. However, EBS volumes that are attached to instances continue to retain information and accrue charges, even when an instance is stopped. For more information, see Amazon EBS pricing.

Note: Amazon EBS doesn't charge you when you detach a volume from an EC2 instance. However, you still accrue charges for volume storage until you delete the volume.

Amazon EBS snapshots are billed at a lower rate than active EBS volumes. You can minimize your Amazon EBS charges but still retain the information that's stored in Amazon EBS for later use. To do this, create a snapshot of the volume as a backup, and then delete the active volume. Later, when you need the information from the snapshot, use the snapshot to replace the EBS volume for use with your infrastructure.

To stop Amazon EBS-related charges, delete EBS volumes and snapshots that you don't need.

Related information

Why did my storage costs not reduce after I deleted a snapshot of my EBS volume and then deleted the volume itself?

Attach an Amazon EBS volume to an instance