Paste a line item from your invoice and find what it bills for, across the Google Cloud services covered so far.
External IP Address
Google charges for external IP addresses by the hour.
A reserved address sitting idle costs more than one attached to a running instance. That inversion is deliberate: it is a nudge to release addresses you are hoarding.
Billed: Per address-hour. Reserved addresses that are NOT attached to a running resource are charged at a higher rate than attached ones.
What triggers this charge
- Static addresses reserved for a service that has since been deleted or migrated.
- Ephemeral and static addresses on VMs, billed at the in-use rate. A static address on a stopped VM still counts as in use and keeps billing.
- A pool of addresses reserved "in case we need them", which is exactly the case the higher idle rate is designed to discourage.
How to reduce it
Release unattached static addresses
Small per address, and there are usually more than anyone expects. It is one of the shortest paths from a billing report to a fixed problem.
Use Cloud NAT for outbound-only workloads
Instances that only need to reach out do not need their own external address. Weigh this against NAT data-processing charges for high-volume egress.
Put public services behind a load balancer instead of VM addresses
Static addresses attached to forwarding rules are not charged as IP addresses, and host- and path-based routing lets many services share one. The forwarding rule has its own hourly charge, so this pays where it replaces several VM addresses.
Rates
Sources and review
- Explanation reviewed:
- 1 Nov 2026, against Google Cloud networking pricing.
- Rates verified:
- not yet. No rate is shown on this page until one is loaded from the Cloud Billing Catalog API.
Related charges
Now find out how much of this you are actually paying.
Finitizer breaks your Google Cloud bill down to the SKU, shows how each one has moved since last week, and separates rate changes from usage changes, so you know whether to talk to engineering or to procurement.
See how Finitizer works