Manage your Cloud Billing account

This document lists topics and tasks related to managing your Cloud Billing accounts. Find the topic or task you're interested in, and follow the links for documentation.

Here are ways you can manage your billing account:

About Cloud Billing accounts

Cloud Billing accounts pay for usage costs in Google Cloud projects and Google Maps Platform projects. Cloud Billing accounts don't pay for Google Workspace accounts. Google Workspace customers need a separate Google Workspace billing account.

You need a Cloud Billing account to use Google Cloud or Google Maps Platform. To use Google Cloud resources in a project, billing must be enabled on the project. Billing is enabled when the project is linked to an active Cloud Billing account.

Pricing information

If you're looking for information about Google API pricing, refer to the documentation for the API you are using.

Create a new Cloud Billing account

There are two types of Cloud Billing accounts:

Billing account types
Self-serve (or Online) account

You can create self-serve accounts online, and manage the forms of payment you use to automatically pay for your Google Cloud and Google Maps Platform usage costs.

Create a new, self-serve Cloud Billing account
Invoiced (or Offline) account

If you prefer to have a Cloud Billing account that pays for your Google Cloud and Google Maps Platform usage costs with a monthly invoice, we must configure invoiced accounts for you.

Apply for monthly invoiced billing

About authorization requests

When you create a new, self-serve Cloud Billing account, you might notice a $0.00 transaction from Google on your bank or credit card statement. These are authorization requests only, not actual charges.

Verify your Google payments contact email address

To ensure you receive Cloud Billing-related and payments-related notifications, we might ask you to verify your email address on your Google payments profile.

Modify your Cloud Billing account settings

After you create a Cloud Billing account and its associated Google payments profile, you can change or update many account settings.

This section lists a few of the settings you can update. For a more complete list, see Modify your Cloud Billing account.

Account settings you can modify
Billing account name The name of the billing account that displays in billing account selectors and tabular lists or reports that display the billing account name.
Mailing addresses There are one or more mailing addresses associated with your billing account. The mailing addresses can include the legally registered business address, and the addresses where invoices are mailed.
Projects linked to the Cloud Billing account A Cloud Billing account defines who pays for a given set of resources, and it's linked to one or more projects. Project usage is charged to the linked Cloud Billing account. You can change the Cloud Billing account linked to each of your projects.
Payment methods for a self-serve billing account Usage costs accrued for a self-serve Cloud Billing account are automatically charged to the payment instrument on file in the associated Google payments profile. These forms of payment typically include credit cards, debit cards, or bank accounts, depending on your country and currency.
Purchase Order number on invoices For Cloud Billing accounts configured to be billed by a monthly invoice, you can set or modify the invoice purchase order number (also called IO number, CPE, or client code), an identifier that appears in the header of your invoices.

Close a Cloud Billing account

You can close an active Cloud Billing account to stop all billable services in any projects linked to the account, such as running VM instances or storage buckets. If your projects aren't linked to an active, valid Cloud Billing account, you can't use the products and services enabled in your projects. This is true even if your projects only use Google Cloud or Google Maps Platform services that are free.

Tip: Rather than closing your account, you can stop new charges from accruing in a Cloud Billing account using one of the following options:

Reopen a closed Cloud Billing account

If your Cloud Billing account is closed or inactive, you can reopen the account.

Before a Cloud Billing account can be reactivated, you must resolve any Google payments-related issues or suspensions. Follow the steps in the resolving declined payments troubleshooter for assistance.

Delete a Cloud Billing account

Cloud Billing accounts can't be deleted. Even if you close your Cloud Billing account, the Cloud Billing account information is retained for reporting and auditing purposes.

If you want to prevent a Cloud Billing account from accruing charges, you can close the Cloud Billing account, or disable billing on the associated projects.

If you want to change the form of payment associated with your Cloud Billing account, you can manage your payment methods in the Google payments center.

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