AWS free tier changes: what you get (2026)

The AWS free tier no longer gives a new account twelve months of free EC2, RDS and S3. Since 15 July 2025 a new AWS account gets $100 in credits at sign-up, a chance to earn $100 more, and six months to spend it, after which AWS closes the account unless you upgrade. The always-free monthly allowances survived. The twelve-month trials did not, and several AWS pages still describe them as though they had.

What changed in the AWS free tier for new accounts?

The program is now two account plans and a credit balance. The AWS Free Tier page: "When you create a new AWS Free Tier account, you get $100 in credits immediately. As you explore key services, you can earn up to $100 more." The old model is not merely deprecated, it is filed under its own heading. The AWS Free Tier Terms carry a second block titled "Legacy Free Tier Terms", introduced with "Applicable to AWS customers with 12-month free tier offers." and still dated "Last Updated: August 14, 2018". That is where the familiar sentence now lives: "The 12 Month Free Tier is only available to new AWS customers, and is available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date."

Existing accounts are untouched. The AWS Free Tier FAQs: "All the benefits of the existing Free Tier program for existing customers will remain unchanged. Existing customers are ineligible for Free Tier credits or the free account plan." The allowances you remember are real, still running, and unavailable to anyone opening an account today.

AWS's own comparison of the two plans, from the Choosing a plan page in the Billing user guide:

One row does most of the damage. A free plan account closes. A paid plan account does not.

How much credit does a new AWS account get, and how long does it last?

$100 immediately, up to $100 more from activities, and two clocks that do not line up. The Terms set the credit clock: "Free Tier Credits expire twelve months from the date you opened your account." And the plan clock separately: "Free Plan accounts will expire (1) six months from the date you opened your account, or (2) once you have exhausted your Free Tier Credits, whichever comes first". On a free plan the six-month clock wins first.

The second $100 is earned, not granted. The Billing guide's Earning additional credits page lists five activities: an EC2 instance, a model in the Bedrock playground, a cost budget, a Lambda web app, and an RDS database. Four of the five carry the same warning: "This activity incurs AWS service charges that are deducted from your AWS Free Tier credits." Earning the credit spends some of the credit. Only the budget activity is exempt.

None of this needs the console: the GetAccountPlanState API returns accountPlanExpirationDate, accountPlanRemainingCredits and an accountPlanStatus of NOT_STARTED, ACTIVE or EXPIRED.

Joining an organization ends it early. The FAQ: "When your account joins an AWS Organization or sets up an AWS Control Tower landing zone, your Free Tier credits expire immediately, and your account will be ineligible to earn more AWS Free Tier credits." How credits behave the rest of the time, including the order AWS consumes several of them in, is covered in how AWS credits actually apply to a bill.

Which AWS services are always free, and which were 12-month trials?

This decides whether a side project keeps running, and AWS publishes the answer as a column. The Billing user guide's Tracking your AWS Free Tier usage page tags each trackable service Always Free or Short-term trial. A selection, verbatim from that column:

Always Free survives the plan ending. The Billing guide's Avoiding unexpected charges after Free Tier page: "You can continue to use Always Free offers, even after your AWS Free Tier eligibility expires." A short-term trial does not, and the same page opens with the hard stop: "Your eligibility for the AWS Free Tier expires 6 months or when your credits are fully used - whichever occurs first."

Read it for what is missing too. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS and Amazon EBS, the four services the twelve-month free tier was famous for, appear nowhere in it.

What is the AWS always-free tier worth next to the $200 credit?

More than the credit, if you stay inside it. AWS never publishes this number, so the arithmetic below is ours, on AWS's rates, using the 720-hour month (24 hours x 30 days) the DynamoDB pricing page uses in its worked examples. That page lists the perpetual allowance as "25 WCUs, 25 RCUs" and "25 GB of data storage" per month per Region, and prices the capacity itself: "25 WCU x $0.00065 per hour x 24 hours x 30 days = $11.70" and "25 RCU x $0.00013 per hour x 24 hours x 30 days = $2.34". Storage past the allowance is "charged at $0.25 per GB".

$27.16 a month is $325.88 a year, from two services, forever. The credit is $200 and expires. Spread across the six-month free plan, $200 is $33.33 a month, so those two allowances alone are worth 81.5% of the credit burn rate. The Lambda side comes from the Lambda pricing page, which states "The free tier includes one million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds per month" and bills overage in its example at "6,320,000 * $0.0000166667 = $105.33". The figures are hypothetical in that they price an allowance nobody is invoiced for. The rates are AWS's.

The credit goes the other way fast. The Amazon SES pricing page charges $50 a month per Mail Manager open ingress endpoint and notes charges apply even when the endpoint status is closed, which exhausts $200 in four months of doing nothing. Its Virtual Deliverability Manager global option at $1,250 a month clears the same balance in 4.8 days. What SES still gives away is in our Amazon SES pricing breakdown.

Where do AWS pages contradict each other about free tier eligibility?

In four places we could find, all live today.

Elastic Load Balancing, FAQ against pricing page. The ELB FAQ answers directly: "Yes. For new AWS accounts, a free tier for a Network Load Balancer offers 750 hours and 15 LCUs. This free tier offer is only available to new AWS customers, and is available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date." The ELB pricing page lists a different set: "Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 750 hours per month shared between Classic and Application load balancers; 15 GB of data processing for Classic load balancers; and 15 LCUs for Application Load Balancers." No Network Load Balancer. Worse, the FAQ appends the July 2025 credit notice to its Application Load Balancer answers but to neither Network Load Balancer answer, so those still read as current advice. What an NLB actually costs is in our NLB pricing breakdown.

The Free Tier tracking page against its own table. The same page that publishes the Always Free column offers this budget example: "you can set up a budget to send you an alert when you're forecasted to exceed 100 percent of the Free Tier limit for Amazon Elastic Block Store". It explains usage types with an EC2 one: BoxUsage:freetier.micro "means that you used an Amazon EC2 micro instance". Neither EBS nor EC2 appears in the table immediately below, headed "Trackable AWS Free Tier services".

The Free Tier API against the program page. The FreeTierUsage data type still documents three categories for its freeTierType field: "12 Months Free", "Always Free", and "Free Trial". The AWS Free Tier page offers a new account two, "Always free" and "Short-term trials". Code written against the API keeps seeing a category the front door no longer sells.

Service pages still measuring in twelve months. The Amazon Cognito pricing page reassures you its allowance "does not automatically expire at the end of your 12-month AWS Free Tier term, and it is available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely", which reads oddly to an account whose term is six months; the per-MAU rates are in our Cognito pricing breakdown. The CloudWatch pricing page puts "Flow monitoring for 10 resources across all accounts for 12 months (7300 resource-hours per month)" under a Free tier heading, for a service the Billing guide calls Always Free without qualification. DynamoDB lists "1 GB of data transfer out (15 GB for your first 12 months), aggregated across AWS services" beside its perpetual allowances.

One AWS page does it correctly, and it is the model for the rest. The Amazon RDS pricing page gates the old offer on a date: "If you signed up for AWS Free Tier prior to July 15, 2025, you can continue to use RDS for free for up to 12 months on select single-AZ instance databases with up to 750 hours per month." Nothing there needs cross-checking.

What happens to an AWS account when the free plan expires?

It closes, and a 90-day clock starts. The Choosing a plan page: "After your free account plan expires, your account closes automatically, and you lose access to your resources and data. AWS retains your content for 90 days before permanently deleting your account and all associated resources." Upgrading inside those 90 days reopens it, and the FAQ adds the detail that catches people mid-panic: downloading your data requires the upgrade first.

Two clauses in the Terms get less attention than they deserve. "Free Plan accounts are provided for evaluation purposes and should not be used for processing sensitive data." And, for every offer: "If you have not used the AWS resources provided under an Offer during the previous 3 months, we may reclaim those AWS resources after giving you 30 days' notice." A dormant learning environment is not guaranteed to still be there.

Upgrading is one-way: "No, you cannot downgrade your paid plan to the free plan." Several actions upgrade you whether you meant to or not, including joining AWS Organizations, setting up a Control Tower landing zone, joining the AWS Partner Network, and designating the account as HIPAA or SEC compliant.

How do AWS free tier usage alerts and the zero spend budget work?

The built-in alert fires at 85%, and you add the 100% one yourself. From the Billing guide: "AWS Free Tier usage alerts automatically notifies you over email when you exceed 85 percent of your Free Tier limit for each service. For additional tracking, you can configure AWS Budgets to track your usage to 100% of the Free Tier limit by setting a zero spend budget using the template." It goes to the root user's address unless you change it under Billing preferences, and the alerts "are automatically activated for all individual AWS accounts, but not for a management account in an AWS Organizations". Inside an organization the allowance itself is pooled rather than granted per account, which is covered in what consolidated billing does to the free tier.

The zero spend budget is one of four templates in Using a budget template, described there as "A budget that notifies you after your spending exceeds AWS Free Tier limits." AWS Budgets is itself an Always Free entry in the trackable table above.

Budgets will not catch a spike quickly. The AWS Budgets page states the refresh rate: "AWS Budgets information is updated up to three times a day. Updates typically occur 8-12 hours after the previous update." On a free plan the consequence is credit burn rather than an invoice, and credits exhausted early closes the account early. The trade-off against anomaly-based alerting is in AWS Budgets vs Cost Anomaly Detection.

What should you check before opening an AWS free tier account in 2026?

Three things. Pick the plan deliberately: the free plan closes the account at the end and cannot be reverted to, while the paid plan takes the same up-to-$200 credit and bills the excess. The credit is not the free plan's alone: "Yes, you are eligible for Free Tier credits if you select paid plan at sign up or upgrade to paid plan within 6-months of opening your AWS account."

Build on the Always Free column, not on the credit. The credit is gone in six months; 25 DynamoDB WCUs and a million Lambda requests a month are not. That DynamoDB allowance is provisioned capacity, so the capacity mode you pick decides whether it applies at all, which is covered in DynamoDB on-demand vs provisioned.

Set the zero spend budget on day one. And check any twelve-month claim on an AWS service page against the central Free Tier page before relying on it. Four AWS pages contradicted each other on this while we were writing, and the FAQ declines to enumerate: "Refer to AWS Free Tier for the list of eligible services for your account type."