When an EC2 Mac instance is stopped or terminated, its associated dedicated host remains allocated by default. Because Mac instances are the only EC2 type billed at the host level, charges continue to accrue as long as the host is retained. This can lead to significant waste when: * Instances are stopped but the host is never released * Hosts are retained unintentionally after workloads are migrated or decommissioned * Automation only terminates instances without deallocating hosts
Billing is based on the **dedicated host reservation**, not instance runtime. Each EC2 Mac instance requires a dedicated Mac host (mac1 or mac2), which is billed per hour from allocation time — regardless of whether the instance is running, stopped, or terminated — unless the host is explicitly released.
