The AWS public IPv4 charge: finding idle Elastic IPs

Since February 1, 2024, AWS charges $0.005 per hour for every public IPv4 address. That covers addresses AWS assigns to instances, Elastic IPs that are in use, and Elastic IPs sitting idle in your account. One address costs $3.65 a month, or $43.80 a year. An idle Elastic IP buys you nothing for that money.

What's charged

In-use public IPv4 addresses, both Amazon-assigned and Elastic IPs: $0.005 per hour in us-east-1.
Idle public IPv4 addresses: also $0.005 per hour. AWS's pricing page says any public IPv4 address associated with your account that isn't used on a resource is charged as idle.
Elastic IPs on stopped instances still bill. A stopped instance has no compute charge, but its associated Elastic IP is charged.
Not charged: addresses you own and bring to AWS with BYOIP.

AWS announced the charge on July 28, 2023. Every account also has a default quota of five Elastic IPs per region.

The arithmetic

Addresses	Per month (730 hours)	Per year
1 idle Elastic IP	$3.65	$43.80
5 idle Elastic IPs (one region's default quota)	$18.25	$219.00
20 public addresses on running instances	$73.00	$876.00

Idle Elastic IPs are pure waste and easy to remove. Addresses on running instances are a design choice. An instance that is only reached through a load balancer, or only makes outbound calls through a NAT gateway, may not need a public address of its own.

Check it yourself

Idle Elastic IPs, console: EC2 console → Network & Security → Elastic IPs. Any address with no associated instance or network interface is idle. Elastic IPs belong to one region, so check each region.

Idle Elastic IPs, AWS CLI (read-only):

aws ec2 describe-addresses --region us-east-1 \
  --query 'Addresses[?AssociationId==null].[PublicIp,AllocationId,Tags[?Key==`Name`].Value|[0]]' \
  --output table

Every public IPv4 address, across all regions: AWS's Public IP insights, part of VPC IP Address Manager, lists Elastic IPs and EC2-assigned addresses. It also lists addresses that services like load balancers, NAT gateways and RDS manage for you. Open the IPAM console → Public IP insights. AWS launched it as a free feature. It shows a banner when you have unassociated Elastic IPs.

What it costs you: Billing and Cost Management → Cost Explorer, grouped by Usage type. Look for usage types containing PublicIPv4:IdleAddress and PublicIPv4:InUseAddress.

How to fix it

Before releasing an address, search your DNS records, partner allow-lists and firewall rules for it. Something may still point at it.
Release it: console → select the address → Actions → Release Elastic IP addresses. Or with the CLI (this one changes your account): aws ec2 release-address --allocation-id eipalloc-0123456789abcdef0 --region us-east-1
For stopped instances you don't plan to start again, release the Elastic IP when you clean up the instance.
For new subnets, consider whether instances need an automatically assigned public address at all.

The free checkup finds this and 20 other kinds of issues automatically. It lists every Elastic IP that isn't associated with anything, in every region you use, and prices each one at $0.005 an hour. It doesn't count in-use public addresses on instances, load balancers or NAT gateways. For those, use Public IP insights.

Run a free checkup

Sources

Price (us-east-1): Amazon VPC pricing, Public IPv4 Address tab; AWS Price List API, Amazon VPC offer for us-east-1, version published September 17, 2026. Usage types PublicIPv4:InUseAddress and PublicIPv4:IdleAddress, $0.005/hour each.
Announcement, dates and BYOIP exemption: New – AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge + Public IP Insights (AWS News Blog, July 28, 2023)
Elastic IP addresses (pricing and the five-per-region quota), How EC2 instance stop and start works, View public IP insights (AWS documentation)
730 hours a month: AWS Pricing Calculator assumptions

Prices are AWS on-demand list prices for US East (N. Virginia), checked October 3, 2026.