Amazon EBS volumes are billed by the gigabyte-month (GB/m). This gigabyte-month is a measure of how many gigabytes of EBS storage are provisioned to your account and how long the EBS storage is provisioned to your account.

In a 31-day month, you are billed for one gigabyte-month in the following scenarios:

• If you have a 31-GB volume that was active for 24 hours.
• If you have a 1-GB volume that was active for 744 hours (the number of hours in 31 days).

You are billed for the total amount of storage provisioned to your account, no matter if of whether the storage is used or not. For example, if you provision a 100-GB EBS volume for a month, but only store 1 GB of data on that volume, you are still billed for 100 GB/m of EBS storage.

To minimize the amount you're billed for Amazon EBS storage, do the following:

• Delete or create snapshots of any volumes you're not actively using.
• Audit your EBS volumes to see if you're using most of the storage in the volume. If not, migrate your data to smaller EBS volumes.