The line nobody can explain
What is "EC2 - Other" on my AWS bill?
EC2-Other is where Cost Explorer puts everything billed under EC2 that is not an instance hour. It is frequently the second-largest EC2 line on a bill and it contains no instances at all.
EC2-Other is a Cost Explorer grouping, not an AWS service. It collects EBS volumes and snapshots, NAT gateway hours and per-GB processing, Elastic IP and public IPv4 charges, data transfer, and load balancer capacity units. To break it down, group Cost Explorer by Usage Type with the service filter set to EC2-Other. In most accounts, EBS storage and NAT gateway processing are the two largest components.
What is inside it, and the list price of each
| Usage type | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|
| EBS:VolumeUsage.gp2 / gp3 | Provisioned volume storage | $0.10 / $0.08 per GB-month |
| EBS:SnapshotUsage | Snapshot storage, incremental | $0.05 per GB-month |
| EBS:VolumeIOUsage / VolumeP-IOPS | io1 and io2 provisioned IOPS | ~$0.065 per IOPS-month |
| NatGateway-Hours | Each NAT gateway, running | $0.045 per hour, ~$32.85 a month |
| NatGateway-Bytes | Every GB through a NAT gateway | $0.045 per GB |
| PublicIPv4:InUseAddress / IdleAddress | Every public IPv4 address | $3.60 per address per month |
| DataTransfer-Out-Bytes | Egress to the internet | From $0.09 per GB |
| DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes | Cross-AZ traffic, both directions | $0.01 per GB each way |
| LoadBalancerUsage / LCUUsage | ALB and NLB base and capacity | From ~$18 a month plus LCUs |
Conservative list prices for us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1 and eu-west-2. Egress pricing is tiered and drops with volume.
Breaking your own EC2-Other down
- 1Open Cost Explorer and filter to the service. Filters, Service, "EC2 - Other". Set granularity to daily for the last 30 days so one-off spikes are visible.
- 2Group by Usage Type. This is the step people miss. Usage Type is what turns one opaque number into the table above, with your figures in it.
- 3Take the top three and work out which resource produces them. For EBS, the volumes console sorted by size. For NAT, the VPC console. For data transfer, group by Operation and then by Availability Zone.
- 4Check for the free fixes first. A gateway VPC endpoint for S3 and DynamoDB costs nothing and takes their traffic off the NAT gateway entirely. gp2 to gp3 is a live modification with no downtime and a flat 20% saving. Neither needs a change to your application.
Why cross-AZ transfer surprises people
Traffic between availability zones is charged at $0.01 per GB in each direction, so a GB moved across an AZ boundary costs $0.02. A chatty microservice architecture spread across three AZs for resilience can spend more on talking to itself than on the instances doing the talking. It appears in EC2-Other as DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes and it is nearly invisible until you group by usage type.
Put numbers on it
Public IPv4 cost calculator
Since 2024 every public IPv4 address costs $3.60 a month whether it is attached or idle. Count yours.
Open calculator →
gp2 → gp3 savings calculator
A flat 20% off your EBS storage, usually with better performance and zero downtime.
Open calculator →
NAT Gateway cost calculator
Charged hourly and per GB, and a lot of that traffic could go over free VPC endpoints instead.
Open calculator →
EBS snapshot cost estimator
Snapshots accumulate forever by default. Price your backup graveyard.
Open calculator →
Data transfer cost calculator
Egress, cross-AZ, inter-region and NAT processing priced separately. The one that gets you is rarely the one you were watching.
Open calculator →
Frequently asked questions
Why is EC2-Other bigger than my EC2 instances?
Usually one of three things: a large EBS estate that has grown while instance count stayed flat, NAT gateway processing on an account that pushes serious traffic to S3, or heavy cross-AZ chatter. All three grow without anyone launching an instance, which is why the ratio drifts.
Does EC2-Other include the instances themselves?
No. Instance hours appear under "EC2 - Instances", or as "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - Compute" depending on the grouping. EC2-Other is deliberately everything else.
How do I stop NAT gateway charges showing up here?
Add gateway VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB, which are free and remove that traffic from the NAT path completely. Then check whether the remaining traffic justifies a NAT gateway in every AZ, or whether one shared gateway is acceptable for non-production. Interface endpoints cost about $7.30 per AZ per month, so they only pay for themselves above roughly 160 GB a month of traffic to that service.
Is there a way to see this without Cost Explorer?
The Cost and Usage Report has far more detail, down to the resource ID, but it needs to be enabled and delivered to S3 first and it takes a day to start. For a one-off investigation, Cost Explorer grouped by usage type is enough.
Keep reading
Prices checked against AWS list rates on 2 August 2026. AWS changes prices; treat every figure here as a close approximation rather than a quote.
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