How are charges for Amazon EBS volumes calculated on my bill?

Resolution

Amazon EBS volumes are billed by the gigabyte-month (GB-month). The GB-month is a measure of how many gigabytes of EBS storage are provisioned to your account. It is also a measure of how long the EBS storage is provisioned to your account.

In a 31-day month, you are billed for one GB-month in the following scenarios:

• If you have provisioned a 31-GB volume for 24 hours.
• If you have provisioned a 1-GB volume for 744 hours (the number of hours in 31 days).

You are billed for the total amount of storage provisioned to your account, even if the storage isn't used. For example, if you provision a 100-GB EBS volume for a month, you are billed for 100 GB-month of EBS storage. Even if you only store 1 GB of data on that volume, you are billed for 100 GB-month of EBS storage.

For more information, see Amazon EBS pricing.

To minimize the amount that you're billed for Amazon EBS storage, do the following:

• Create snapshots of any volumes that you're not actively using.
• Delete snapshots that you no longer need.
• Audit your EBS volumes to see if you're using most of the storage in the volume. If not, migrate your data to smaller EBS volumes.

Related information

How am I billed for my Amazon EBS snapshots?

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