Creating a member account in your organization

An organization is a collection of AWS accounts that you centrally manage. This page describes how to create AWS accounts within your organization in AWS Organizations. For information about creating a single AWS account, see the Getting Started Resource Center.

You can do the following procedures to manage the accounts that are part of your organization:

• Creating an AWS account that is part of your organization

• Accessing a member account that has a management account access role

Considerations before creating a member account

Organizations automatically creates an IAM role for the member account

When you create a member account in your organization, Organizations automatically creates an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role OrganizationAccountAccessRole in the member account that enables users and roles in the management account to exercise full administrative control over the member account. Any additional accounts attached to the same managed policy will be updated automatically whenever the policy gets updated. This role is subject to any service control policies (SCPs) that apply to the member account.

Organizations automatically creates an service-linked role for the member account

When you create a member account in your organization, Organizations automatically, automatically creates service-linked role AWSServiceRoleForOrganizations in the member accunt that that enables integration with select AWS services. You must configure the other services to allow the integration. For more information, see AWS Organizations and service-linked roles.

Member accounts can require additional information to operate as a standalone account

AWS does not automatically collect all the information required for a member account to operate as a standalone account. If you ever need to remove a member account from an organization and make it a standalone account, you must provide that information for the account before you can remove it. For more information, see Leave an organization from your member account.

Member accounts only be created in the root of an organization

Member accounts in an organization can only be created in the root of an organization, and not in any other organizational units (OUs). After you create a member account root of an organization, you can move it between OUs. For more information, see Moving accounts to an OU or between the root and OUs.

Member accounts for organizations managed by AWS Control Tower should be created in AWS Control Tower

If your organization is managed by AWS Control Tower, then create your member accounts using the AWS Control Tower account factory in the AWS Control Tower console or using the AWS Control Tower APIs. If you create an member account in Organizations when the organization is managed by AWS Control Tower, the account won't be enrolled with AWS Control Tower. For more information, see Referring to Resources Outside of AWS Control Tower in the AWS Control Tower User Guide.

Member accounts must opt in to receive marketing emails

Member accounts that you create as part of an organization are not automatically subscribed to AWS marketing emails. To opt-in your accounts to receive marketing emails, see https://pages.awscloud.com/communication-preferences.

Creating an AWS account that is part of your organization

After you sign in to the organization's management account, you can create member accounts that are automatically part of your organization. When you create an account using the following procedure, AWS Organizations automatically copies the following Primary contact information from the management account to the new member account:

• Phone number

• Company name

• Website URL

• Address

It also copies the communication language and Marketplace information (vendor of the account in some AWS Regions) from the management account.

Minimum permissions

To create a member account in your organization, you must have the following permissions:

• organizations:CreateAccount

• organizations:DescribeOrganization – required only when using the Organizations console

• iam:CreateServiceLinkedRole (granted to principal organizations.amazonaws.com to enable creating the required service-linked role in the member accounts).

AWS Management Console

To create an AWS account that is automatically part of your organization

1. Sign in to the AWS Organizations console. You must sign in as an IAM user, assume an IAM role, or sign in as the root user (not recommended) in the organization’s management account.

2. On the AWS accounts page, choose Add an AWS account.

3. On the Add an AWS account page, choose Create an AWS account (it is chosen by default).

4. On the Create an AWS account page, for AWS account name enter the name that you want to assign to the account. This name helps you distinguish the account from all other accounts in the organization and is separate from the IAM alias or the email name of the owner.

5. For Email address of the account's owner, enter the email address of the account's owner. This email address cannot already be associated with another AWS account because it becomes the user name credential for the root user of the account.

6. (Optional) Specify the name to assign to the IAM role that is automatically created in the new account. This role grants the organization's management account permission to access the newly created member account. If you don't specify a name, AWS Organizations gives the role a default name of OrganizationAccountAccessRole. We recommend that you use the default name across all of your accounts for consistency.

   Important

   Remember this role name. You need it later to grant access to the new account for users and roles in the management account.

7. (Optional) In the Tags section, add one or more tags to the new account by choosing Add tag and then entering a key and an optional value. Leaving the value blank sets it to an empty string; it isn't null. You can attach up to 50 tags to an account.

8. Choose Create AWS account.

   • If you get an error that indicates that you exceeded your account quota for the organization, see I get a "quota exceeded" message when I try to add an account to my organization.

   • If you get an error that indicates that you can't add an account because your organization is still initializing, wait one hour and try again.

   • You can also check the AWS CloudTrail log for information on whether the account creation was successful. For more information, see Logging and monitoring in AWS Organizations.

   • If the error persists, contact AWS Support.

   The AWS accounts page appears, with your new account added to the list.

9. Now that the account exists and has an IAM role that grants administrator access to users in the management account, you can access the account by following the steps in Accessing member accounts in your organization.

Note

When you create an account, AWS Organizations initially assigns a long (64 characters), complex, randomly generated password to the root user. You can't retrieve this initial password. To access the account as the root user for the first time, you must go through the process for password recovery. For more information, see Accessing a member account as the root user.

AWS CLI & AWS SDKs

The following code examples show how to use CreateAccount.

.NET

AWS SDK for .NET

Note

There's more on GitHub. Find the complete example and learn how to set up and run in the AWS Code Examples Repository.

    using System;
    using System.Threading.Tasks;
    using Amazon.Organizations;
    using Amazon.Organizations.Model;

    /// <summary>
    /// Creates a new AWS Organizations account.
    /// </summary>
    public class CreateAccount
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Initializes an Organizations client object and uses it to create
        /// the new account with the name specified in accountName.
        /// </summary>
        public static async Task Main()
        {
            IAmazonOrganizations client = new AmazonOrganizationsClient();
            var accountName = "ExampleAccount";
            var email = "[e-mail]";

            var request = new CreateAccountRequest
            {
                AccountName = accountName,
                Email = email,
            };

            var response = await client.CreateAccountAsync(request);
            var status = response.CreateAccountStatus;

            Console.WriteLine($"The staus of {status.AccountName} is {status.State}.");
        }
    }

• For API details, see CreateAccount in AWS SDK for .NET API Reference.

CLI

AWS CLI

To create a member account that is automatically part of the organization

The following example shows how to create a member account in an organization. The member account is configured with the name Production Account and the email address of [e-mail]. Organizations automatically creates an IAM role using the default name of OrganizationAccountAccessRole because the roleName parameter is not specified. Also, the setting that allows IAM users or roles with sufficient permissions to access account billing data is set to the default value of ALLOW because the IamUserAccessToBilling parameter is not specified. Organizations automatically sends Susan a "Welcome to AWS" email:

aws organizations create-account --email [e-mail] --account-name "Production Account"

The output includes a request object that shows that the status is now IN_PROGRESS:

{
        "CreateAccountStatus": {
                "State": "IN_PROGRESS",
                "Id": "car-examplecreateaccountrequestid111"
        }
}

You can later query the current status of the request by providing the Id response value to the describe-create-account-status command as the value for the create-account-request-id parameter.

For more information, see Creating an AWS Account in Your Organization in the AWS Organizations Users Guide.

• For API details, see CreateAccount in AWS CLI Command Reference.