Kubernetes 1.33 leaves standard support on Amazon EKS, extended support costs 6x more

Kubernetes 1.33 became available on Amazon EKS on May 30, 2025, and standard support runs 14 months from that date — which puts the cutoff at the end of July 2026. Clusters still running 1.33 after that point are automatically enrolled in extended support rather than being force-upgraded or cut off, which is the AWS-friendly outcome, but it isn't free: the per-cluster control-plane charge jumps from $0.10 to $0.60 an hour, a 6x increase, and it applies per hour per cluster whether or not you've noticed the switch happened.

Extended support does keep shipping security patches for the control plane and critical patches for the VPC CNI, kube-proxy, CoreDNS, and EKS-optimized AMIs, so a cluster on extended support isn't unsafe to run — it's just meaningfully more expensive to leave there. For a small team running one or two clusters, that's a real monthly cost difference for no functional gain over just upgrading.

The action item is concrete and has a real deadline: check which Kubernetes minor version your EKS clusters are running, and if any are on 1.33, schedule the upgrade before the automatic switch to extended-support billing rather than after. AWS's own guidance frames extended support as a safety net for clusters that genuinely can't upgrade in time, not as a pricing tier to opt into deliberately — for most workloads, the cheaper and simpler path is just moving off 1.33 before the window closes.