How to Change the Billing Account for a GCP Project, the short version | by Alexis MP | Google Cloud – Community | Nov, 2025

If you want to upgrade from a Free Trial account and keep the credits amount, you should instead follow these steps: Activate a full, paid Cloud Billing account.

Read on for details and tips on how to change the billing account for your GCP project.

Whether you are migrating from a free trial to a paid account or simply updating how you want to be charged for your google cloud usage, you will need to change the billing account (the payment method) associated with a Google Cloud Project. The process is quite seamless and does not cause downtime for running services.

🛠️ But first, check your permissions

If you are the creator of both the project and the billing account, you likely already have these permissions you can skip this section. Otherwise you will only be able to link a project to a billing account if you have permissions on both the project and the target billing account:

1. you must be a Project Owner or a Project Billing Manager for the project
2. you must be a Billing Account User or Billing Account Administrator for the billing account

Step-by-Step Guide (console version)

(command-line version below)

First, select your project :

Then, navigate to Billing :

If asked, click on “Go to linked billing account” :

This leads you to a screen that presents you with the name and ID of the billing account and the list of projects that it supports. From there, simply choose “change billing” for your project.

… and set the new Billing Account from the list you are presented :

If the new target billing account does not exist, consider reading the paragraph above about permissions.

The project should now be linked to the new billing instrument. All future usage from this point forward will be charged to the new account.

Step-by-Step Guide (command-line version)

Using the gcloud CLI is often faster than the console, especially if you’d like to do bulk operations. You’ll first have to identify your project ID (not the project name).

If you only have a few projects, this command is a handy one to list IDs:

% gcloud projects list

Next, you’ll need the ID of the new Billing Account; one that is returned by this command (in the form of XXXXXX-XXXXXX-XXXXXX) :

% gcloud billing accounts list

The actual linking to the new billing accounts is done

% gcloud billing projects link [PROJECT_ID] --billing-account [BILLING_ACCOUNT_ID]

At this point, you should be able to see the new billing account.

By the way, if you want to shut down billing for any given project, this is the command :

% gcloud billing projects unlink [PROJECT_ID]

⚠️ Important Considerations

• Switching billing accounts does not stop your VM instances, databases, or applications. It is purely an administrative change with no downtime.
• Billing isn’t instantaneous, so your old billing account may see some activity for accrued usage. Only usage occurring after the switch is billed to the new account.

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