Close an AWS account

Closing your account will serve as your notice of termination of the AWS Customer Agreement for this account.

You don't need to delete resources in your AWS account before closing it. However, we recommend you back up any resources or data that you want to keep. For instructions about how to back up a particular resource, see the appropriate AWS documentation for that service.

You can reopen your account during the post-closure period. Charges for the services that remained in your account will restart if you reopen it. You also remain responsible for any unpaid invoices and outstanding Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.

You remain responsible for all outstanding fees and charges for the services consumed before account closure. You will receive an AWS bill the following month after closing your account. For example, if you closed your account on January 15, you will receive a bill at the beginning of February for usage incurred from January 1 through January 15. You will continue receiving invoices for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans after closing your account until they expire.

You will no longer be able to access AWS services that were previously available in your account. However, you can sign-in and access a closed AWS account during the post-closure period only to view past billing information, access account settings, or contact AWS Support.

You can't use the same email address that was registered to your AWS account at the time of its closure as the primary email of another AWS account. If you want to use the same email address for a different AWS account, we recommend updating it before closure. See Update the AWS account name, email address, or password for the root user for instructions on updating your email address.

If you've enabled multi-factor authentication (MFA) on your AWS account root user, or configured an MFA device on an IAM user, MFA isn't removed automatically when you close the account. If you choose to leave MFA turned on during the 90 days post-closure period, keep the MFA device active until the post-closure period has expired in case you need to access the account during that time. Note, the hardware TOTP token devices cannot be associated with another user after the permanent closure of your account. If you would like to use the hardware TOTP token with another user later, you have the option to deactivate the hardware MFA device before closing the account. MFA devices for IAM users must be deleted by the account administrator.

When you close a member account, that account isn't removed from the organization until after the post-closure period. During the post-closure period, a closed member account still counts toward your quota of accounts in the organization. To avoid having the account count against the quota, see Remove a member account from your organization before closing it.

You can only close 10% of member accounts within a rolling 30 day period. This quota is not bound by a calendar month, but starts when you close an account. Within 30 days of that initial account closure, you can't exceed the 10% account closure limit. The minimum account closure is 10 and the maximum account closure is 1000, even if 10% of accounts exceeds 1000. For more information about Organizations quotas, see Quotas for AWS Organizations.

If you use AWS Control Tower, you need to unmanage the member account before you attempt to close the account. See Unmanage a member account in the AWS Control Tower User Guide.

AWS Marketplace subscriptions aren't automatically canceled on account closure. If you have any subscriptions, first terminate all instances of your software in the subscriptions. Then, go to the Manage subscriptions page of the AWS Marketplace console and cancel your subscriptions.

After an account has been closed, AWS will send daily emails for up to five days before we suspend the domain. After the domain has been suspended, and depending on the domain’s registrar, we will either delete the domain within 30 days or release the domain to its registrar. For more information, see My AWS account is closed or permanently closed, and my domain is registered with Route 53.

AWS CloudTrail is a foundational security service. This means that trails created by users can continue to exist and deliver events even after an AWS account is closed, unless a user explicitly deletes the trails in their AWS account before closing it. Before you close your AWS account, consider the following:

For more information and information on how to request trail deletion after an AWS account has been closed, see AWS account closure and trails in the CloudTrail User Guide.