The change

AWS published a new page called AWS Non-Payment and Service Continuity Terms, dated “Published: October 30, 2026.” On the same day it added section 1.33 to its AWS Service Terms, which says AWS “has the right to limit resource usage, suspend your account(s), terminate active resources, and close your account(s)” if you fail to pay on time.

A day earlier, on October 29, 2026, AWS also updated its Customer Agreement with a new sentence about paying invoices and charging your card.

What changed

• A clear timeline for unpaid accounts. Suspension first, closure after 30 days, and permanent deletion after another 60 days.

• Running resources can be shut down. AWS can terminate “Active Resources” such as compute instances, serverless functions, and model training jobs.

• Temporary data is lost. “If we terminate any of your Active Resources, any Non-Persistent Data associated with those Active Resources will be permanently lost.”

• Backups are your job. “It is your responsibility to back up or retrieve any data prior to account suspension and closure.”

• No duty to prevent loss. “AWS has no obligation to prevent data loss or deletion resulting from account suspension and closure in accordance with these terms.”

• Your card can be charged. The Customer Agreement now says: “You must pay all invoices by the due date set forth on the invoice and you authorize us to charge your default payment method for the invoiced amount.”

From a missed payment to deletion

The new terms describe the steps in order:

• You miss a payment. AWS “can, upon notice to you, limit new or existing resource usage, suspend access to your AWS account, or both.”

• You still have not paid after 30 days of suspension. “If you do not pay all amounts owed within 30 days of account suspension, AWS can close your account.”

• Your account is closed. “Once AWS closes your account, you have 60 days to reopen your account before it is permanently closed and the remaining content and resources are deleted.”

• During those 60 days, “you cannot access Your Content or AWS Services unless you reopen your account.”

• After the 60 days, AWS will permanently close the account and delete the remaining data and resources, subject to any data retention period in your agreement.

Added together, that is about 90 days from suspension to permanent deletion.

Reopening has its own deadline

The 60 days do not mean you can pay on day 59. To reopen the account, you must contact AWS Support, and AWS must receive full payment, the invoice ID, and any other requested details by the 30th day of the 60-day period. AWS says this allows for banking delays and processing time.

The terms also ask you to act before any of this starts: “It is your responsibility to retrieve any data from your account prior to any limitation or suspension to minimize disruption to your business.”

Running resources can be shut down

Separately from closing the account, AWS “has the right, upon notice to you, to terminate your Active Resources.” The terms define these as any service provisioned for you or “actively processing or computing on your behalf,” including compute instances, serverless functions, accelerators, model training and inference jobs, and in-memory caches.

Some data disappears with them. Data held in memory, instance store volumes, temporary caches, or a runtime state is lost for good. AWS also warns that “By default, the root EBS volume is deleted when an instance is terminated.” Once the account is permanently closed, “Restoration of Active Resources is not available.”

What did not change

• AWS could already suspend an account when “you are in breach of your payment obligations under Section 3.”

• AWS may still charge “interest at the rate of 1.5% per month (or the highest rate permitted by law, if less) on all late payments.”

• If your default payment method fails, AWS may still “charge any other valid payment method associated with your account.”

Who this affects

The new terms apply to anyone who pays AWS, from a single developer to a large company. They matter most when a card expires, an invoice goes to the wrong inbox, or a payment is disputed, because suspension can follow soon after a missed payment once AWS sends notice.

Your own contract can still differ. The new terms describe what AWS can do “in accordance with the terms of your Agreement,” so companies with a negotiated AWS agreement should check how it handles late payments.

Why this matters

Cloud providers are writing down exactly what happens to unpaid accounts. Google Cloud added new triggers for billing suspension and termination, and Apple can now delete iCloud data that goes over your storage limit.

Exit and deletion rules are easy to miss because they sit outside the main contract. AWS put these in a separate page linked from its Service Terms, which is why it pays to monitor vendor terms of service and every page they point to. We saw a similar change when Airtable stopped giving customers 30 days to export data after they leave.

Potential impact

If you use AWS, the update raises four practical questions:

• Is the default payment method on your AWS account current, and is there a backup method?

• Who receives AWS invoices and billing notices, and do they act on them quickly?

• Do you keep regular snapshots or backups of data that lives only on running instances?

• Does your negotiated AWS agreement, if you have one, set different rules for late payment?

How Venpo detected it

Venpo monitors AWS’s legal pages and flagged the Customer Agreement update on October 30 and the new Service Terms section on October 31, 2026, with every inserted and deleted line marked. The record is on the AWS page on Venpo. Every quote in this article was checked against the redlines and against the live pages at the time of publication.

Business outcome

Teams that see this change can check their payment methods, route billing notices to someone who acts on them, and set up backups before a missed invoice turns into lost data. That is what continuous monitoring of vendor legal changes is for.

Key takeaway

Since October 30, 2026, AWS’s terms say an unpaid account can be suspended, closed after 30 days, and permanently deleted after another 60 days, running resources can be shut down with their temporary data lost, and your default payment method can be charged for each invoice.