How do I remove active resources that I no longer need in my AWS account?

Resolution

Check for active resources

Complete the following steps:

1. Open the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.
2. In the navigation pane, choose Bills.
3. On the Charges by service tab, expand each service to identify the AWS Regions where services incur charges. You must remove the resources in those Regions.
   Note: If you use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations, then the Charges by account tab lists totals for all accounts.
4. Choose a previous month from the dropdown list to view its charges. Note the services that have active resources for the current and previous billing periods.

Note: The Billing and Cost Management console takes about 24 hours to update usage and charge information for active resources. For more information, see Understanding unexpected charges and Why did I receive a bill after I closed my AWS account?.

Remove resources for all AWS Services

Note: You don't need to delete your resources before you close your account.

To remove active resources for any AWS Service, complete the following steps:

1. Open the AWS Management Console.
2. Open the console for the service that contains the resources that you want to remove, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). To find a specific service, you can enter the service name in the search bar.
3. On the service console, remove all your active resources. Be sure to check each Region where you allocated resources.

Remove resources for specific AWS Services

Amazon EC2

To delete active Amazon EC2 instances, see How do I delete or terminate my Amazon EC2 resources? For information about Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage charges for your EC2 instances, see Why am I charged for Amazon EBS when all my instances are stopped?

Amazon S3

To delete Amazon S3 objects and buckets that you created, see How do I delete Amazon S3 objects and buckets?

Note: Before you delete the objects in the bucket, you must deactivate server access logging. Otherwise, logs might be immediately written to your bucket after you delete your bucket's objects.

To delete an Amazon S3 bucket that AWS Elastic Beanstalk created, see Deleting the Elastic Beanstalk Amazon S3 bucket.

Note: If you delete a bucket that Elastic Beanstalk created, then existing applications in the corresponding Region might not accurately function.

Amazon RDS

To delete Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) resources, see Deleting a DB instance or Deleting a DB snapshot. To delete retained automated backups of DB instances, see Deleting retained automated backups.

Amazon Lightsail

To delete your active Lightsail resources, see How do I shut down my Amazon Lightsail resources?

Amazon EMR

To terminate an Amazon EMR cluster, see How do I terminate an Amazon EMR cluster?

Amazon ECS

To remove an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) service, see How do I delete or terminate an Amazon ECS service?

Amazon VPC

To delete a NAT gateway in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), see How do I delete a NAT Gateway in Amazon VPC?

Other AWS services

To remove resources for other services, see the AWS Documentation for that service.

Note: It's a best practice to delete your active AWS Directory Service directories before you close your account. For more information, see How do I delete an AWS Directory Service directory?

Charges for subscriptions

For Reserved Instances (RIs), Savings Plans, or other subscriptions, you continue to incur charges after you close or suspend your account.

Reserved instances

If you have RIs with a monthly charge, then you're billed for the subscriptions until the plan term ends. This applies to monthly charges for the following resources:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) RIs
• Amazon RDS RIs
• Amazon Redshift RIs
• Amazon ElastiCache Reserved Cache Nodes

AWS can't cancel an RI before the subscription term ends. You can list your Amazon EC2 RIs for sale on the EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace. For more information, see Sell Reserved Instances for Amazon EC2 in the Reserved Instance Marketplace.

Savings Plans

If you signed up for a Savings Plan, then you're charged for the compute usage until the plan term ends.

Other subscriptions

Active AWS Marketplace subscriptions aren't automatically canceled when you close your account. You must first terminate all instances of your software in the subscriptions. Then, cancel subscriptions on the Manage subscriptions page of the AWS Marketplace console.