Getting Your Bill

You can download a monthly report of your estimated AWS charges from the Account Activity page. For consolidated billing customers, this report is currently available only to the payer accounts and includes activity for all the accounts linked to the payer account. Linked account owners can obtain the monthly report only from the payer account owner at this time.

The report contains line items for each AWS product and operation the account uses. The estimated report is updated multiple times per day. Monthly reports are available for previous months by selecting the statement period.

Detailed billing reports provide line items for every hour (or partial hour) of AWS activity for an account. For consolidated billing customers, the report displays a line item for all AWS usage by linked accounts and the payer account. The term for this set of accounts linked to a payer account is the consolidated billing account family. You see two line items for all usage in the detailed billing reports for consolidated billing accounts. One line belongs to the payer and represents the charge for the usage. The other line belongs to the linked account and is an allocation of cost from the payer account charges to the linked account. The topic Blended Rates for Consolidated Billing Accounts explains this allocation process in detail.

You choose to have the detailed billing report generated on the Billing Preferences page, as with the monthly report. Unlike with the monthly report, however, you cannot download it from the Account Activity page. Instead, it is delivered to the same Amazon S3 bucket as the monthly report as a .zip file. You can access this file programmatically using the Amazon S3 API, or by manually navigating to the bucket using the Amazon S3 console. These reports are only available starting with the date at which you opted in to the feature.

The detailed billing report can run to sizes of more than a gigabyte, and may exceed the capacity of tools such as Microsoft Excel to display every line. Your database administrator may need to import it into a database for analysis. To reduce its size, the hourly report contains only a subset of fields in the monthly report. For example, it does not display fields that would be the same for every record, such as Invoice Date or Billing Period Start Date. See the section CSV Report Fields

Blended and Unblended Rates: The detailed billing report enables customers to perform detailed cost analyses on their usage. AWS meters usage in hourly increments; for each product resource in use, a rate is applied for operations performed by usage type in that hour, with each operation comprising a line item. The hourly report shows both blended and unblended rates for each line item. An unblended rate is the cost per hour for a product, usage type, and the operation performed. A blended rate is an average rate calculated for identical instance usage in an Availability Zone for members of a consolidated billing family.

The following list describes the primary uses that AWS intends for the detailed billing report:

To learn more about consolidated billing and the potential savings that apply when you purchase Reserved Instances, see the following topics:

The Detailed Billing Report with Resources and Cost Allocation Tags adds additional dimensions by which you can view your AWS charges. This report includes resource identifiers for many of the AWS services. Amazon EC2, for example, provides a ResourceID value for each Amazon EC2 instance run under your account. You can use this field to view your charges for each AWS resource, as well as for data filtering and aggregation.

In addition, any cost allocation tags you have applied to your resources are appended to each line item in the report. You can filter or aggregate on these tags too. For information about creating these tags, see Cost Allocation and Tagging.

As with the other reports, you can sign up for this report on the Billing Preferences page.

The following table lists the fields that appear in the monthly and detailed billing reports. Click the link on each field name to read a descriptions and usage notes.

The following list describes the information that appears in the fields of both the monthly and detailed billing (hourly) CSV reports.

The detailed billing (hourly) report can be used to visualize your usage over time. This enables you to determine, for example, when you are underusing your Reserved Instance capacity, or when application load is precipitating the use of on-demand instance hours.

The following graph shows usage by an acount over the course of a 24-hour period. The account has purchased four Reserved Instances, which meets demand in every hour except between 5:00:00 AM and 11:59:59 AM. During these hours, up to four additional instances operate to meet demand. In addition, low demand requires only three instances during two hours from 7:00:00 PM to 8:59:59 PM.

Note: When you do not use Reserved Instance capacity, the reservation is not applied to overages in other hours. For consolidated billing customers, unused capacity can be applied to other accounts in the family for identical usage types in the same Availability Zone.

A tag is a label you assign to an AWS resource. Each tag consists of a key and a value, both of which you define. AWS uses tags as a mechanism to organize your resource costs on your Cost Allocation Report.

The following diagram illustrates the concept. In the diagram, you've assigned tags to two Amazon EC2 instances, one called Cost Center and another called Stack. Each of the tags also has an associated value.

You apply tags to resources through simple API requests or through the AWS Management Console for services that support tagging. Each AWS service has its own implementation of tags. The following is a current list of services that support tags.

AWS recommends you devise a set of tag keys that represent how you want to organize your costs. If you use a consistent set of tag keys to track your costs, your Cost Allocation Report will display the keys as additional columns with applicable values for each row.

For an example of how tags appear in your Cost Allocation Report, see Viewing a Cost Allocation Report.

To get a Cost Allocation Report, you first need to sign up for Programmatic Billing Access. Then, opt in to the Cost Allocation Report, and AWS publishes the report as a CSV file to the same Amazon S3 bucket you specify for Programmatic Billing Access. AWS publishes the report several times each day.

CSV files are stored in your designated bucket using the following naming convention.

123456789012-aws-cost-allocation-yyyy-mm.csv 

123456789012 = account ID

y = year

m = month

You'll see two sets of reports in your bucket: one is the Downloadable CSV Report for Programmatic Billing Access, and the other is your Cost Allocation Report (also a CSV file).

The Cost Allocation Report includes the same line items as the Downloadable Report (see Monthly and Detailed Billing Reports ), plus additional columns you've selected to include in the report identified by your tag keys.

When you select tag keys to include in your Cost Allocation Report, each key becomes an additional column and includes the value for each corresponding line item. Since you might use tags for more than just your Cost Allocation Report (e.g., tags for security or operational reasons), you can include or exclude individual tag keys for the report. This ensures that you're seeing meaningful billing information that helps organize your costs. A small number of consistent tag keys makes it easier to track your costs. For more information, see Viewing a Cost Allocation Report.

For consolidated billing customers, your Cost Allocation Report includes all the usage, costs, and tags for your linked accounts. By default, all keys registered by linked accounts where you are the Payer are available for you to include or exclude from your report.

The following example tracks the charges for several cost centers and applications. Resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon S3 buckets) are assigned tags like "Cost Center"="78925" and "Application"="Widget1". In the Cost Allocation Report, the user-assigned tag keys have the prefix "user", such as "user:Cost Center" and "user:Application". AWS-assigned tag keys have the prefix "aws". The keys are column headings identifying each tagged line item's value, such as "78925".

You can use an application like Microsoft Excel to create pivot tables that group the keys and the values for each key so you can see combined values for tagged resources. The following example organizes information first by "Cost Center" and within each cost center further organizes the information by the "Application" tag.

Pick your keys carefully so you have a consistent hierarchy of values; otherwise, your report won't aggregate costs effectively, and you'll have many line items.