How do I delete or terminate EC2 resources?

Last updated: 2019-07-22

What resources are associated with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service, and how do I delete them?


Amazon EC2 resources fall under a few general billing categories. To stop accruing charges for EC2 resources, delete or terminate all On-Demand EC2 resources in all AWS Regions.

Do the following in all AWS Regions:

Note: Deleted, terminated, or released resources can't be recovered.

Most AWS customers use only a few of these resources in one or two Regions. To see the Regions that have active resources, check your monthly bill in the Billing and Cost Management console.

Note: Reserved Instances are billed as a flat fee each month. The fee is determined by the contract that you agreed to when you activated the Reserved Instance. Reserved Instances can't be canceled, but if you have a US bank account, you can list them for sale on the Reserved Instance Marketplace.

The following EC2-related resources don't generate charges when used or provisioned to an account:

  • Virtual private clouds (VPCs)
  • Security groups
  • Key pairs
  • Elastic network interfaces (ENIs)
  • Auto Scaling groups

Note: Amazon Lightsail and EC2 are separate services and are billed separately. For more information about Lightsail, see Lightsail docs.