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

Resolution

You're billed for Amazon EBS volumes by the gigabyte-month (GB-month). The GB-month is a measure of how many gigabytes of EBS storage that you provision to your account. A GB-month is 1 GB of storage stored for 30 days.

You can aggregate a GB-month in the following ways:

• You provision a 30-GB volume for 24 hours.
• You provision a 1-GB volume for 720 hours (the number of hours in 30 days).

You're billed for the total amount of storage that you provision to your account, even if you don't use the storage. For example, if you provision a 100-GB EBS volume for a month, then you're billed for 100 GB-month of EBS storage. Even if you store only 10 GB of data on that volume, you're billed for the full provisioned storage.

For more information and pricing examples, see Amazon EBS pricing.

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

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

Related information

How am I billed for my Amazon EBS snapshots?

Why was I charged for Amazon EC2 after I terminated all my instances?