Can You Queue Amazon EC2 Savings Plans in Advance?

Yes, Amazon EC2 Savings Plans can be queued in advance so that a new plan automatically starts when an expiring plan ends. AWS allows you to schedule future Savings Plan purchases up to three years in advance by specifying a future start date and time during the purchase process or by enabling automatic renewal on an existing plan. This capability ensures uninterrupted discount coverage for your compute workloads without requiring manual intervention at the exact moment a current commitment expires, preventing temporary spikes in On-Demand billing and eliminating the risk of overlapping commitments.

How Queuing Savings Plans Works

When you queue a Savings Plan in AWS Cost Explorer, through the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or via the AWS SDK, you are placing an order in the queued state. A queued plan does not apply discounts or incur charges until its scheduled start time arrives.

When your existing Savings Plan reaches its expiration timestamp, its state changes to retired, and the queued plan transitions to active at its designated start time. To ensure seamless coverage without a billing gap or double-billing overlap, you set the start time of the new queued plan to match the exact end time (down to the second, in UTC) of the expiring plan.

Two Ways to Seamless Transition Between Plans

AWS provides two distinct mechanisms to ensure a new Savings Plan takes over immediately when an old one expires: Manual Queuing and Automatic Renewal.

1. Queuing a Custom Savings Plan Manually

Manual queuing is ideal when your architecture or compute spend has changed and you want the replacement plan to have a different hourly commitment, term length, payment option, or plan type (for example, switching from an EC2 Instance Savings Plan to a Compute Savings Plan).

To manually queue a Savings Plan in the AWS Management Console:

  1. Open the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.
  2. Navigate to Savings Plans in the left navigation pane and select Inventory to view your active plans.
  3. Note the exact End date (including the timestamp in UTC) of the plan you wish to replace.
  4. Choose Purchase Savings Plans from the navigation menu.
  5. Configure your new plan parameters (Savings Plan type, 1-year or 3-year term, hourly commitment, and payment option).
  6. In the Start date (UTC) section, select Specify a future date and enter the exact expiration date and time of your current plan.
  7. Add the plan to your cart and complete the order.

Once submitted, the plan appears in your Savings Plans inventory with a status of Queued.

2. Enabling Automatic Renewal

If you want to maintain the exact same Savings Plan configuration (same type, hourly commitment, term length, and payment option), you can use the built-in renewal feature instead of manually creating a queued purchase.

When you enable auto-renewal on an active Savings Plan, AWS automatically queues an identical replacement plan 30 days before your current plan expires. You can toggle auto-renewal on or off in the Savings Plans inventory console at any time up until the current plan expires.

Billing and Commitment Continuity

To maintain a continuous commitment without gaps or overlaps, the transition time \(t_{\text{start}}\) of the queued plan must equal the expiration time \(t_{\text{end}}\) of the active plan:

\[t_{\text{start, new}} = t_{\text{end, current}}\]

If \(t_{\text{start, new}} < t_{\text{end, current}}\), your hourly commitments will stack during the overlap period \(\Delta t = t_{\text{end, current}} - t_{\text{start, new}}\), meaning you will be billed for the sum of both commitments:

\[C_{\text{total}} = C_{\text{current}} + C_{\text{new}}\]

Conversely, if \(t_{\text{start, new}} > t_{\text{end, current}}\), your instances will temporarily revert to On-Demand rates during the gap unless covered by another active commitment.

Payment Timing and Canceling Queued Plans

How and when you are billed for a queued Savings Plan depends on the payment option selected:

  • All Upfront and Partial Upfront: Upfront charges are not billed when you place the order in the queue. Instead, the upfront invoice is generated when the queued plan transitions to the active state on its scheduled start date. recurring monthly charges (for Partial Upfront) also begin once the plan activates.
  • No Upfront: Monthly recurring charges begin accruing at the scheduled start time.

Because payment and commitment activation do not occur until the scheduled start time, you retain full flexibility to modify your plans before they go live. You can delete a queued Savings Plan at any time prior to its scheduled start date and time without penalty. Once the start timestamp passes and the plan enters the active state, the commitment is locked in and cannot be canceled.