All checks
Low
Unused EC2 EIPs should be removed
Flags an Elastic IP address attached neither to an EC2 instance nor to a network interface in use. AWS bills every Elastic IP address held, in use or idle, so an unused one is a standing cost. To keep it, associate it with an instance or an attached interface; one held on purpose for a standby workload is better suppressed than released.
- service
- EC2
- severity
- Low
- scope
- evaluated in every region
How to fix it
- Can't be undone: A released address comes back only through allocate-address --address, and not once another account holds it, so first check DNS records, allow-lists and VPN peer configurations that name it.
In the console
EC2 → Elastic IPs → the address → Actions → Release Elastic IP addresses
With the AWS CLI
aws ec2 release-address --allocation-id <allocation-id> --region <region>See which of your accounts this check is failing on.
Book a live scan