AWS VPC IPAM adds cross-account pools, per-IP hourly billing

AWS rolled out an Advanced Tier for VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) on 10 May 2026, adding cross-account pool management and per-active-IP hourly charges [AWS Blog]. The new tier expands the original IPAM service with three key capabilities: cross-account scopes, cross-region pools, and per-IP hourly billing at $0.001 per active IP-hour [AWS Blog].

The Advanced Tier allows organizations to create a single IPAM instance in the master account and share pools across all member accounts in an AWS Organization. A top-level pool can be carved into regional sub-pools, letting teams allocate CIDRs that are guaranteed non-overlapping regardless of where the VPC lives. AWS now charges a small hourly rate for each managed IP address that remains active, replacing the previous “free-tier only” model [Dev.to].

The feature also ships with built-in CloudWatch metrics and alarms that fire when a pool reaches 80 % utilization, and a public-IP insight view that flags idle Elastic IPs. This helps teams reclaim idle public IPv4s, which cost roughly $0.005 per hour, before the monthly bill climbs [AWS Blog].

By forcing every allocation through a managed pool, IPAM guarantees uniqueness, eliminating the manual spreadsheet audits that often miss collisions. IPAM records every allocation and de-allocation event, providing a searchable history that satisfies internal governance and external audit requirements without additional tooling [Dev.to]. For enterprises running dozens of VPCs across multiple accounts, the cost of a single re-IP migration (often $10k-$20k in labor and downtime) dwarfs the hourly IP charge, making the Advanced Tier a net-positive for any organization that has outgrown the single-account limit.