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This document describes some of the Cloud Billing issues you might encounter and provides guidance on how to resolve these issues.

If you're using Google Workspace, see Troubleshoot issues with Google Workspace billing.

If you need help with your Cloud Billing account, Google Cloud offers free Cloud Billing Support to all customers. If you want to talk to a support representative about a Cloud Billing question or a billing-related issue, visit our Cloud Billing Support page for contact options.

Understand why you've been charged

This section describes a few common questions about when you're charged.

Charges that occur more than once a month

Your Cloud Billing account might incur charges more than one time a month, depending on your charging cycle and your level of billable usage.

Postpay charging cycles and payments accounts:

For Postpay accounts with automatic payments triggered by threshold billing, if your accrued balance exceeds your payment threshold, you're charged on that day. In addition, you're charged on the first day of the next month for any additional costs that you accrue.

For example, if your threshold is 500, you're charged every time that your costs reach 500. So if your costs total 1675 EUR in a month, you're charged 500 three times (3 x 500 = 1500). In addition, you're charged on the first day of the next month for the outstanding balance of 175.

Learn more about automatic payments and threshold billing.

Prepay charging cycles and payments accounts:

For Prepay accounts with auto-reload enabled, if your credit balance falls below a value you specify, you'll be charged at that time to buy more credits, based on the reload amount you configured.

For example, if your specified "trigger" amount is "when my balance falls below $30", and you configure a "reload value" to "add $100" in credits, then you're charged $100 each time your credit balance falls below $30. Depending on your level of usage, and the trigger amount and reload amount you've specified, you might see multiple charges in the same month.

Prepay billing is configured in Google AI Studio: For more information, refer to the Gemini API in AI Studio billing documentation.

Learn more about split charging cycles for self-serve (online) Cloud Billing accounts.

Charges after making a manual payment

For Postpay accounts with automatic payments triggered by threshold billing, if you make a manual payment, you might still be charged on your automatic billing cycle. Here are some possible reasons:

An automatic payment was already in progress when you initiated your payment: The automatic payment cycle is punctual, so if you made your payment when this process was underway, you might still be charged your automatic payment amount. This is most likely to happen if you make a manual payment when you're close to your billing threshold, or at the end of the calendar month.
You reached the end of your billing cycle: After you make a manual payment, your account returns to its usual billing cycle. You'll receive an automatic charge after your account costs reach your billing threshold, and on the first day of the month.

If the total of your automatic payment plus manual payment is greater than the amount you owe, the "overpayment" is added as a credit to your account and applied immediately to your accrued costs.

Learn more about making a manual payment to a Postpay payments account

Unrecognized charges from Google Cloud and other Google services

This section describes what you should do if you receive charges that you don't recognize for Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform, Firebase, or Google AI Studio services. Your contact options depend on if you have a Cloud Billing account or not.

You have a Cloud Billing account

If the form of payment linked to your Cloud Billing account was charged for Google services that you don't recognize, or you received an unexpected invoice for Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform, Google AI Studio, or Firebase services, contact Cloud Billing Support.

You don't have a Cloud Billing account

If you were charged by Google Cloud for Google services that you don't recognize, or you received an unexpected invoice for Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform, Firebase, or Google AI Studio services that you don't recognize, and you don't own a Google Cloud or Cloud Billing account, submit a Cloud Billing Support ticket through the Unknown Google Cloud Charge Inquiry form.

Charges after account compromise or suspension

If you've identified that your Cloud Billing account was compromised or suspended due to unusual activity, you might still see charges for usage that occurred before and immediately after the suspension. Here's why:

Lag in resource termination: While a billing account suspension prevents new resource creation and typically leads to the termination of existing resources, there can be a time lag. Compute instances or other services might continue to consume resources for a short period before they are fully shut down or de-provisioned across all underlying systems. Charges incurred during this lag period are valid.
Existing charges: Any usage that occurred before the account suspension or compromise, up to the point of effective resource termination, will be billed.

We recommend taking immediate action if you suspect your account has been compromised.

What to do if your account is compromised:

Secure your account: Follow the steps in Handling compromised Google Cloud credentials This includes rotating API keys and securing user accounts.
Stop unapproved resource consumption: If you still have access to the Google Cloud console, manually stop or delete any resources that you don't recognize or that were created by an unauthorized user.
Contact Cloud Customer Care: Immediately contact Cloud Billing Cloud Customer Care to report the compromise and discuss potential billing adjustments. Google Cloud reviews such cases on an individual basis.

Preventative measures for unexpected charges:

Monitor for anomalies: Use Cloud Billing anomaly detection to receive alerts about unusual spending patterns.
Set up programmatic budget controls: Implement programmatic cost controls to automatically stop or scale down resources if your spending exceeds a predefined budget. For more information, see Control resource usage.
Secure your API keys: Make sure that your API keys are properly restricted and secured to prevent unauthorized usage. Refer to the security documentation for the specific services that you use.

Dispute charges

The process to dispute unauthorized charges depends on your country.

UPI AutoPay in India

If you're a Unified Payment Interface (UPI) user in India and have an unauthorized charge from Google Cloud on your account, follow these steps:

Cancel your UPI AutoPay mandate to prevent further unauthorized charges.
Contact your bank to request a refund.

United States and other countries

Contact your bank to dispute unauthorized charges, which the bank treats as a chargeback.

Your bank notifies Google of the disputed charge, and then Google does the following:

Sends you an email that your dispute was received.
Reviews the details of the dispute and the documentation or evidence you provided.
Submits a decision to your bank, based on the results of that review. This information may agree or disagree with the dispute you filed.

Depending on the decision, you might see one of these changes on your Cloud Billing account:

If Google agrees with your disputed charge: The charge is corrected in your Cloud Billing account. You can see the correction in your transaction history, and you don't need to take any action.
If Google disagrees with the disputed charge, and the card-issuing bank doesn't resolve the chargeback in your favor: The charge won't be returned to you. Your account will remain active.
If Google disagrees with your disputed charge, and the card- issuing bank resolves the dispute in your favor: Your account will have an overdue balance. You can continue service on your account by making a manual payment.

Missing Cloud Billing transactions or documents

Cloud Billing documents and transactions are accessible in the Google Cloud console and the Google payments center.

Learn how to find your Cloud Billing documents, such as invoices, statements, and payment receipts.
Learn how to view your transaction history.

Delayed billing

Google Cloud and billing-eligible products such as Google Maps Platform, Google AI Studio, and Firebase report usage data to Cloud Billing at varying intervals. Due to the complexity of our billing and processing systems, you might see a delay between your use of services, the usage charges being applied to your Google payments accounts, and the usage and costs being available to view in the various cost reports and dashboards.

Typically, your cost details are available within a day, but can sometimes take more than 24 hours.
For self-serve, online accounts, it's possible that charges for some usage might occur rapidly, such as 5 to 15 minutes after usage.
Because of this difference in timing, you might notice charges on your Postpay or Prepay payments accounts occur before you can view the details of those charges in a cost report or billing dashboard. These system delays also impact budget alerts, anomaly detection, and billing data exported to BigQuery.

After accounting for processing and reporting delays, if you can't find a specific document or transaction related to your usage of resources and services in Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform, Firebase, and Google AI Studio, contact Cloud Billing Support for assistance.

Viewing credits and adjustments

When Google needs to modify your account balance, you receive adjustments. Adjustments come in the form of credits and debits, which reduce your account balance or create additional invoices you must pay.

If your account is configured for monthly invoicing, you might also receive documents called memos when an adjustment is issued.

Credit memos apply to previous, current, or future invoices and reduce the amount you need to pay, or may remain on your account as unapplied to be applied to invoices at your discretion.
- If you have unapplied payments or credits, they will appear above your invoices.
- To apply an unapplied payment or credit, contact our collections team and let them know how you want to apply it.
Debit memos act as additional invoices that you must pay, and aren't associated with a specific invoice.

Separately, you might also have promotional credits applied to your account. Promotional credits differ from adjustments and are applied to future use charges.

Understand memos and adjustments

Credit and debit memos describe credit and debit adjustments that have been issued to your invoiced Cloud Billing account.

Credit memos describe adjustments that reduce the amount you need to pay for the month in which the credit adjustment is applied.
Debit memos describe adjustments that increase the amount you must pay for the month in which the debit adjustment is applied.

The month a memo is issued can be different from the month the adjustment is applied to your invoice. Credit memos can be applied to a previous, current, or future invoice. For example, a credit memo could be issued in April that documents a credit adjustment applied to a March invoice. Similarly, a credit memo could be issued in May describing a credit adjustment to be applied to your June invoice.

When a credit memo is applied to an invoice, the invoice shows the credit memo amount as an amount paid, reducing the outstanding balance owed on the invoice.

The following table describes how credit and debit memos are reflected in each page, report, or output.

Page, report, or output	Description
Cloud Billing Documents page	Access documents issued for your Cloud Billing account, where you can view detailed information about individual debit and credit memos and the correlating adjustments. Viewing an invoice from the Documents page of the Google Cloud console shows all credit memos applied to that invoice during the invoice period. Memo activity isn't shown in the downloadable invoice PDF. Viewing a credit memo from the Documents page of the Google Cloud console shows which invoice the memo was applied to. Debit memos aren't associated with a specific invoice.
Cost table report	The Cost table report gives you a detailed, tabular view of your costs by individual invoice. The report lists the individual adjustments so you can see the credit and debit memos applied on the invoice you're viewing. Depending on the type of billing correction issued, adjustment amounts might only appear in the footer of the report. The report doesn't include memos issued but not applied during the invoice period. Data in the cost table report can be downloaded to CSV.
Billing Reports	In Billing Reports, you can view and analyze your Google Cloud usage costs using many selectable settings and filters. To view billing modifications or adjustments in a billing report, set your Time range to Invoice month. In the report, modifications are labeled Adjustments and appear in the footer of the billing report. Adjustments are aggregated across all invoices issued for the invoice months you're viewing, so you can see the total of the credit and debit memos applied to all of the invoices issued during the invoice months. The adjustments shown correspond to the invoice, credit memo, and debit memo documents available in the Documents area of the Billing section in the Google Cloud console. The report doesn't include memos issued but not applied during the invoice period. If you want to analyze your Google Cloud costs after receiving SKU-level corrections, such as a retroactive price adjustment on a previously-billed service, view your costs using a Usage date Time range. When you view costs by usage date, any corrections or charges for late-monetized usage are accumulated, and you don't need to worry about any temporarily incorrect data. If you want view more detailed information on your corrections, configure your billing report as follows: Set your report's Time range to Invoice month. Select a date-based Group by option (for example, Date > Service). In the report's table, look for any charges with a usage date before the start of the invoice month. These charges are the results of corrections or late-monetized usage. Data in the billing reports can be downloaded to CSV.
Cost breakdown report	When viewing the Cost breakdown report by invoice month, adjustments are aggregated across all invoices issued for the invoice months you're viewing, so you can see the total of the credit and debit memos applied to all of the invoices issued during the invoice months. The report doesn't include memos issued but not applied during the invoice period. Data in the cost breakdown report can be downloaded to CSV.
Cloud Billing data export to BigQuery	In your exported data, when adjustments are issued, your export is appended with corrective data. These adjustments fall under one of two categories: billing modifications or corrections. Billing modifications appear as separate line items. If you received a billing modification, you'll see a new line item in your Cloud Billing export to BigQuery showing the change. Credit and debit memos reflect the month the adjustment was issued. However, the exported data doesn't include information about when and where the memos are applied. To learn if and where an adjustment is applied, review the details of the invoice and credit or debit memo documents available in the Cloud Billing Documents page. Corrections appear as new data that negates incorrect data on the source SKUs. In some cases, there will be new data that replaces the incorrect charge. Learn more about how corrections are viewed in your data export.

View invoices, adjustments, and memos applied to your account

Invoices, adjustments, and memos are viewed on the Invoices page in Cloud Billing.

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Invoices page.

Go to the Invoices page
At the prompt, choose the Cloud Billing account you want to view.

On the Invoices page:

You see a table with all of the documents that have been issued for your Cloud Billing account.
You can use filters and search tools to locate specific documents.
For more information on the features in the Invoices page, see Get a Cloud Billing document such as an invoice, statement, or receipt.

Look at the details of an invoice or memo

From the Invoices table, click the row of the invoice or document that you want to view details for. A dialog opens, showing you document header details including the invoice or memo number, amount, status, purchase order number, and account details.

In the Document Activity section, you can see information including the addresses where the document was mailed and emailed, as well as invoices or credit and debit memos that might apply to the document.
In the Associated documents section, you can see a list of documents and document types that apply to the document you're viewing.
To view an itemized list of all the charges on an invoice, use the Cost table report.

Promotional credits are viewed on the Credits page in the Billing section of the Google Cloud console.

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Billing Credits page.

Go to the Billing Credits page
At the prompt, choose the Cloud Billing account you want to view.

The Credits page opens for the selected Cloud Billing account.

The Credits page is a tabular listing of your promotional credits. For each promotional credit, you will see the Credit name, the Status of the credit (available, used, or expired), the Remaining value and Original value, the Type (recurring or one-time), the Credit ID that appears on invoices, the Scope if the credit is restricted to particular services or SKUs, and the Start date and End date.

Discounts are a different category of credits and aren't included on the Credits page. Discount credits include free tiers, sustained use discounts, committed use discounts, spending based discounts (contractual), subscriptions, and reseller margin.

To view the details of the different types of credits that are applied to your Cloud Billing account, both discounts and promotions, view the Billing Reports.

The Credits page is also accessible from the Billing Account Overview page.

On the Billing Account Overview page, your costs for the current month are summarized in a cost summary report card, including an amount for Credits used.
The Credits used amount sums the value of all of the types of credits applied during the time range of the cost summary, including discount credits (such as committed use discounts or subscriptions) and promotional credits.
Below the Credits used amount, select View details to access the Credits page to see a detailed list of all your promotional credits, including expired and exhausted credits.
To view the breakdown of all of the credits included in the Credits used amount, select View details on Reports.

Request a refund

If you have unused funds in your Cloud Billing account's linked Postpay payments account, you might be eligible for a refund. For example, if you made an early payment and have funds left over that you don't plan to use, you can request a refund of those unused funds.

We don't offer refunds in the following cases:

You have an unused promotional credit balance left over in your billing account.
You have an outstanding amount due on your Cloud Billing account's linked Postpay payments account. If you're unsure if this is the case, select a Cloud Billing account and then click the Payment overview tab to see if there's an outstanding balance in your billing account.
You have unused credits in a Prepay payments account to pay for Gemini API in AI Studio usage. Unused credits expire after 1 year from the date of purchase and are non-refundable, with a few exceptions. For example, if you meet the criteria to upgrade your Prepay account to a Postpay billing tier, remaining Prepay credits are automatically refunded during the upgrade process. Learn more about refund policies for Prepay accounts.

Permissions required to request a refund

You must be a Billing Administrator on the Cloud Billing account to request a refund.

How to request a refund

To request a refund for a Postpay payments account complete the following steps:

In the Google Cloud console, sign in to the Payment overview page for your Cloud Billing account.

Go to Payment overview
At the prompt, choose the Cloud Billing account that you want to request a refund for. The Billing Payment overview page opens for the selected billing account. If you have a credit on the account, you see the Request a refund button.
Click Request a refund.
Confirm the payment method to receive the refund. Refunds are issued to your original payment method.
Note: If there's a problem with your original payment method and the refund can't be issued, contact support and provide a valid bank account to receive your refund.

If your refund request is processed, your refund is credited to the payment method associated with the Cloud Billing account.

Resolve service restrictions caused by overdue balances

You might have an overdue balance on your Cloud Billing account if you are late paying your invoice or a payment was declined on your self-serve/online account. If you have a delinquent account balance, you might experience service degradation or restrictions that limit your Google Cloud usage. For example, you might experience throttling or be unable to perform actions like:

Access certain workloads
Create new projects
Increase quotas

To restore full platform usage, pay your overdue balance by using the following instructions, depending on whether you have an invoiced or self-serve/online billing account:

Invoiced accounts

Make a payment to an invoiced billing account.
After you resolve your delinquent account, you might need to restart Google Cloud services.

Self-serve/online accounts

Follow these instructions to resolve declined payments.

Resolving declined payments on self-serve (online) accounts.
(Customers in India) Automatic payments declined due to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regulations.
After you resolve your delinquent account, you might need to restart Google Cloud services.

Resolving declined payments on self-serve (online) accounts

Sometimes payments are declined, and when they are, we might stop running your services until your payment can be processed. You can get your services running again in just a few steps.

Find out the reason for the decline. You can view declined payment information for your billing account and its linked Google payments account on the Transactions page. In your transaction history, you can see the date of the decline, the amount, and, if your bank shared it with us, the reason for the decline. (Keep in mind that Google doesn't decline payments; your bank or credit card institution does.)
Contact your bank or credit card company. If you can't figure out why your payment was declined or if you can't solve the issue, contact your bank or credit card company. Give them the date and amount of the declined payment, and they should be able to tell you what the problem is and help you fix it.
Note: If you're a customer in India, your card might be declined due to local financial regulations. Learn about resolving declined recurring payments in India.
Re-enable your form of payment. After you've contacted your bank and made sure that the form of payment will work, you need to access the Payment method page for your Google payments account to re-enable it:
Postpay account
Follow these steps to re-enable the payment method on your Postpay Google payments account:
1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Payment method page.
  
  Go to the Payment method page
2. At the prompt, choose the Cloud Billing account you want to manage.
  
  The Payment method page opens for the Postpay payments account.
3. On the Payment method page, find the form of payment and make sure that all of the details are correct for this form of payment.
4. Below the information for the form of payment, click Fix.
Prepay account
Follow these steps to re-enable the payment method on your Prepay Google payments account:
1. In the Google AI Studio console, go to Dashboard > Billing.
  
  Go to the AI Studio Billing page
2. Locate the How you pay card and click Manage payment methods.
  
  The Payment method page opens for the Prepay payments account.
3. On the Payment method page, find the form of payment and make sure that all of the details are correct for this form of payment.
4. Below the information for the form of payment, click Fix.
Make a payment or purchase credits. After you've contacted your bank and made sure that the payment method will work, you can do one of the following based on the type of Google payments account you're using:
- Postpay payments account: You can make a manual payment.
- Prepay payments account: You can purchase additional credits to pay for your usage of Gemini API in AI Studio.
  
  For either account, if you're using a bank account as your payment method, the amount you paid or purchased might be subject to a delay in posting.

Note the following:

A self-serve online Cloud Billing account is always linked to a Postpay Google payments account. If there is an issue with your Postpay payments account, such as a delinquent account balance, a declined payment, or an invalid payment method, your overall Cloud Billing account might be suspended until you resolve the issue. If your Cloud Billing account is suspended, ALL services in ALL of the projects that are linked to the Cloud Billing account are stopped. This includes your prepaid usage of Gemini API in AI Studio, regardless of how many credits are available in your Prepay account.

To resolve a suspended Cloud Billing account, you need to fix the issue on your Postpay account. After you resolve any issues that are impacting the overall state of your Cloud Billing account, then you will regain access to your Prepay credit balance and your Gemini API services.
After you have re-enabled your form of payment and your billing account is in good standing, you might need to manually restart some services. For more information, see Restarting Google Cloud Services.
While your Cloud Billing account is inactive or suspended, your BigQuery exports are paused. When you re-enable your form of payment, your BigQuery export isn't backfilled with data for the duration that your account was inactive.
For Postpay payments accounts, re-enabling your form of payment without making a manual payment will automatically trigger a charge for your outstanding balance. It may take a few hours to process the payment. If the payment isn't successful within one business day after you re-enabled your form of payment, reactivate your account by making a manual payment or adding a new payment method. For more information, see Add, remove, or update a payment method or Make a Manual Payment.
You can keep your services running by entering a backup credit card. We charge your backup card only if your primary form of payment is declined. For more information, see Add, remove, or update a payment method.
If your billing account remains invalid for a protracted period, some resources might be removed from the projects associated with your account. For example, if you use Google Cloud, your Compute Engine resources might be removed. Removed resources aren't recoverable.

(Customers in India) Automatic payments declined due to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regulations

Due to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regulations, for new Google Cloud accounts, we might be unable to charge you automatically for one of these reasons:

Your card doesn't support automatic payments.
Your usage costs are over 5,000, which is the limit that the RBI has set for automatic payments.

In these cases, you get this error message: Your card does not support automatic recurring payments.

To keep your services running, if your automatic payments are being declined, we recommend one of these options:

Make manual payments for your usage. You can also make manual payments to proactively add credit to your account.
Try adding a different card.
Consider working with a local reseller, who might be able to accept more forms of payment, or help you switch to invoiced billing. Find a list of resellers on the Google partners page.

Changes to card information stored in Google

Starting October 1, 2022, due to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) card storage regulations, Google can't save your card details in the current format. Depending on your card, you can authorize us to save your card details in a format that complies with RBI regulations.

Learn more about authorizing Google to save your card details in a new format.

Other Cloud Billing issues

If you're stuck and you want to talk to a support representative about a Cloud Billing question or a billing-related issue that you're having, visit Cloud Billing Support for contact options.

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