Default region is not being honored by AWS Console

Some services will force you to certain regions. IAM for example, while "global" will show as us-east-1 in some cases.

Another potential cause is the URL or link you are using to access the AWS console has the region in it and that's overriding your default. For example, if you use us-west-1 as your default but follow this link: https://us-east-2.console.aws.amazon.com/rds/home?region=us-east-2 you would arrive at the RDS console in us-east-2 (Ohio)