How much does an idle m5.2xlarge cost on AWS?
An m5.2xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $280/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $83/mo — a $197/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.3840/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$280/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$197/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $0.3840/hr | $0.1382/hr | ≈ $280/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.3840/hr | $0.1267/hr | ≈ $280/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.3840/hr | $0.1728/hr | ≈ $280/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $0.4040/hr | $0.1616/hr | ≈ $295/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $0.4280/hr | $0.2097/hr | ≈ $312/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $0.4600/hr | $0.1472/hr | ≈ $336/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $0.4800/hr | $0.1680/hr | ≈ $350/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $0.4800/hr | $0.1728/hr | ≈ $350/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $0.4960/hr | $0.1786/hr | ≈ $362/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $0.6120/hr | $0.0857/hr | ≈ $447/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $280/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $200/mo | -$80/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $83/mo | -$197/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the m5 family
M5 is AWS's long-standing general-purpose family on Intel Xeon (Skylake/Cascade Lake): a balanced ratio of vCPU to memory that suits application servers, mid-size relational databases, and general backend workloads. It's the default choice for a huge share of staging and pre-prod environments precisely because it "just works" for almost anything — which also means it's rarely revisited once provisioned, and keeps billing 24/7 long after the project it was built for goes quiet.
Regional pricing varies: m5.2xlarge runs $0.3840/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.6120/hr in sa-east-1, the priciest — a 37% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, m5.4xlarge (16 vCPU / 64 GB RAM), costs about $561/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than m5.2xlarge's ~$280/mo — for 2x the vCPU.
Common questions
How much does an idle m5.2xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), an m5.2xlarge costs $0.3840/hr, or about $280/mo if it runs 24/7. That's the on-demand list price — an idle instance costs exactly the same as a busy one, since cloud billing doesn't know the difference.
How much can I save by scheduling it off outside work hours?
Restricting it to business hours only (10×5) saves about $197/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $80/mo (29%).
Should I move from m5 to a newer generation like m6i or m7i?
Newer generations offer better per-core performance at a similar list price, so for new environments they are usually the better pick. Existing m5 staging fleets often stay put because migration effort outweighs the gain. Either way, the schedule matters more than the generation: the cheapest vCPU is the one that is stopped.
Other m5 sizes
Stop paying for idle AWS servers
Idlefy runs a free audit of your fleet, then flips dev servers to stopped-by-default: lease one when you need it, and
when the lease ends it shuts itself off — stop, not terminate, persistent disks intact. Timers are set by your team, never
guessed, and Idlefy only manages instances tagged idlefy=enabled — on AWS that boundary is enforced by the IAM policy itself.
Prices are on-demand list price for Linux instances and exclude storage, network, data transfer, and any negotiated or volume discounts. Actual bills vary by usage and account-level pricing. Prices as of 2026-07-20. Spot figures are indicative — AWS values are derived from AWS's published typical savings vs on-demand for the region; GCP values are the listed Spot price. Spot capacity can be reclaimed by the provider. Stopping preserves EBS and persistent-disk volumes; data on local instance-store or local-SSD drives does not survive a stop.