This documentation is a draft for private preview for regions in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Documentation content will continue to evolve. Published: December 30, 2025.

Update the alternate contacts for your AWS account

Alternate contacts allows AWS to contact up to three alternate contacts associated with the account. An alternate contact doesn't have to be a specific person. You could instead add an email distribution list if you have a team that manages billing, operations and security related issues. These are in addition to the email address associated with the root user of the account. The primary account contact will continue to receive all email communications sent to the root account’s email.

You can specify only one of each of the following contact types associated with an account.

Phone number and email address requirements

Before you proceed with updating your account's alternate contacts information, we recommend that you first review the following requirements when entering phone numbers and email addresses.

Update the alternate contacts for a standalone AWS account

To add or edit the alternate contacts for a standalone AWS account, perform the steps in the following procedure. The AWS Management Console procedure below always works only in the standalone context. You can use the AWS Management Console to access or change only the alternate contacts in the account you used to call the operation.

AWS Management Console

To add or edit the alternate contacts for a standalone AWS account

Minimum permissions

To perform the following steps, you must have at least the following IAM permissions:

• account:GetAlternateContact (to see the alternate contact details)

• account:PutAlternateContact (to set or update an alternate contact)

• account:DeleteAlternateContact (to delete an alternate contact)

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console as an IAM user or role that has the minimum permissions.

2. Choose your account name on the top right of the window, and then choose Account.

3. On the Account page, scroll down to Alternate contacts, and to the right of the title, choose Edit.

   Note

   If you don't see the Edit option, it is likely that you are not signed in as the root user for your account or as someone who has the minimum permissions specified above.

4. Change the values in any of the available fields.

   Important

   For business AWS accounts, it's a best practice to enter a company phone number and email address rather than one belonging to an individual.

5. After you have made all of your changes, choose Update.

AWS CLI & SDKs

You can retrieve, update, or delete the alternate contact information by using the following AWS CLI commands or their AWS SDK equivalent operations:

• GetAlternateContact

• PutAlternateContact

• DeleteAlternateContact

Notes

• To perform these operations from the management account or a delegated admin account in an organization against member accounts, you must enable trusted access for the Account service.

Minimum permissions

For each operation, you must have the permission that maps to that operation:

• GetAlternateContact (to see the alternate contact details)

• PutAlternateContact (to set or update an alternate contact)

• DeleteAlternateContact (to delete an alternate contact)

If you use these individual permissions, you can grant some users the ability to only read the contact information, and grant others the ability to both read and write.

The following example retrieves the current Billing alternate contact for the caller's account.

$ aws account get-alternate-contact \
    --alternate-contact-type=BILLING
{
    "AlternateContact": {
        "AlternateContactType": "BILLING",
        "EmailAddress": "saanvi.sarkar@amazon.com",
        "Name": "Saanvi Sarkar",
        "PhoneNumber": "+1(206)555-0123",
        "Title": "CFO"
    }
}

The following example sets a new Operations alternate contact for the caller's account.

$ aws account put-alternate-contact \
    --alternate-contact-type=OPERATIONS \
    --email-address=mateo_jackson@amazon.com \
    --name="Mateo Jackson" \
    --phone-number="+1(206)555-1234" \
    --title="Operations Manager"

This command produces no output if it's successful.

Note

If you perform multiple PutAlternateContact operations on the same AWS account and the same contact type, the first adds the new contact, and all successive calls to the same AWS account and contact type update the existing contact.

The following example deletes the Security alternate contact for the caller's account.

$ aws account delete-alternate-contact \
    --alternate-contact-type=SECURITY

This command produces no output if it's successful.

Note

If you try to delete the same contact more than once, the first succeeds silently. All later attempts generate a ResourceNotFound exception.

account:AlternateContactTypes context key

You can use the context key account:AlternateContactTypes to specify which of the three billing types is allowed (or denied) by the IAM policy. For example, the following example IAM permission policy uses this condition key to allow the attached principals to retrieve, but not modify, only the BILLING alternate contact for a specific account in an organization.

Because account:AlternateContactTypes is a multi-valued string type, you must use the ForAnyValue or ForAllValues multi-value string operators.