AWS cost · billing

Closed your AWS account? It can still bill you

By Ivan Tsekov

I thought closing an AWS account ended everything: resources gone, charges gone. Then, in October 2026, I talked to someone with an unpaid bill on an account closed months earlier.

Per AWS's Knowledge Center, a closed account still gets a last bill for the usage before closing. Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Marketplace subscriptions and CloudTrail trails can keep billing after that.

What does AWS still bill after you close?

Servers, databases and storage stop billing when the account closes. These do not. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are the long ones: they are a promise to pay for one or three years, and closing the account does not end it.

For how their terms work, see Savings Plans vs reserved instances.

The 90-day trap

For 90 days after closing, AWS keeps your files and data. You can still sign in and pay. To see what a bill is for, open Bills in the Billing console and look under Charges by service. You can also reopen the account, which restarts the charges for whatever is still in it.

After day 90 the account is closed for good. AWS deletes your files and data, except CloudTrail trails, and you can't sign in. An unpaid bill is still yours. The details are in AWS's Close an AWS account guide.

That is where the person I talked to was stuck. The billing emails were deleted, so the account ID was gone too. AWS publishes no direct phone number. What is left is AWS's account support form for people who can't sign in.

If you still have AWS's monthly “Billing Statement Available” email, check its subject. Mine shows the account ID there. Put it in the form's message.

Locked out of an account that is still open?

A forgotten account you can't sign in to is not closed. It bills every month for everything still running in it. Another person I talked to had a monthly charge on their card, and no access to the account or its email. The way in is the same form: describe the charge and ask to get back in or to close the account. Blocking the card stops the payments, not the bill.

How to close an account without surprises

Before you press Close account, check what will keep billing. These commands only read. Reserved Instances are per Region, so run those for each Region you used, replacing eu-central-1:

# spend by service for a date range you pick (each call costs $0.01)
aws ce get-cost-and-usage \
  --time-period Start=2026-10-01,End=2026-10-21 \
  --granularity MONTHLY --metrics UnblendedCost \
  --group-by Type=DIMENSION,Key=SERVICE \
  --query 'ResultsByTime[].Groups[].[Keys[0],Metrics.UnblendedCost.Amount]' \
  --output table

# active EC2 Reserved Instances and when they end
aws ec2 describe-reserved-instances --region eu-central-1 \
  --filters Name=state,Values=active \
  --query 'ReservedInstances[].[InstanceType,InstanceCount,End]' \
  --output table

# RDS reservations (start + duration in seconds = end)
aws rds describe-reserved-db-instances --region eu-central-1 \
  --query "ReservedDBInstances[?State=='active'].[DBInstanceClass,DBInstanceCount,StartTime,Duration]" \
  --output table

# active Savings Plans and when they end
aws savingsplans describe-savings-plans --states active \
  --query 'savingsPlans[].[savingsPlanType,commitment,end]' \
  --output table

# CloudTrail trails
aws cloudtrail describe-trails \
  --query 'trailList[].[Name,HomeRegion,IsMultiRegionTrail]' \
  --output table

Then:

• First, if the email you sign in with uses a domain registered in Route 53 in the same account, move the domain to another account or change the email. Closing suspends the domain, the email stops arriving, and without the email you can't recover the account.
• Sell EC2 Standard Reserved Instances you no longer need on the Reserved Instance Marketplace. You need to have held them 30 days, have a month left and have a US bank account; AWS keeps 12%. Other reservations can't be sold, so note their end dates.
• Note when each Savings Plan ends. Only a plan bought in the last 7 days, in the same month, at $100 an hour or less, can be returned.
• Cancel Marketplace subscriptions on the Manage subscriptions page of the AWS Marketplace console.
• Delete the trails you created. This one changes your account: aws cloudtrail delete-trail --name <trail>.
• Keep one billing email. Its subject can show the account ID.
• Pay the last bill before day 90.

Frequently asked questions

Source: AWS Knowledge Center: Why did I receive a bill after I closed my AWS account?

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