Hidden cost · Last verified 2026-08-25

Public IPv4 addresses

A public IPv4 address can be an hourly charge even when no traffic flows.

Official pricing: Source

This item is not in the current price snapshot. No rate is shown.

A public IPv4 address is a time meter, not a free property of launching a virtual machine. AWS documents an hourly charge for every public IPv4, attached or idle, including addresses on EC2, NAT gateways, load balancers, RDS, VPN tunnels, and Global Accelerator. The change took effect on 1 February 2024 and is described on the VPC pricing page and the AWS news blog. The twelve-month Free Tier allowance, measured in hours, applies to EC2 public IPv4 only, not to NAT or load-balancer addresses. This snapshot does not yet track the IPv4 SKU, so no rate is rendered here; the bound compute SKUs are the instance hours that usually drag an address along, not the address itself. Azure bills Standard public IP resources separately from the virtual-machine hour. Google Cloud distinguishes unused versus in-use external IPs and also bills Cloud NAT IPs by the hour. DigitalOcean includes a public address in the Droplet monthly cap. Prefer IPv6, shared NAT, or private-only subnets, then read https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address-charge-public-ip-insights/ and https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing before you count addresses on a napkin.