Does an AWS tag policy enforce that your resources are tagged? No. It standardises the values of tags that are already there, and a resource created with no tags at all is not non-compliant. It is unevaluated.

The problem

Tagging usually gets treated as solved on the day a tag policy is attached in AWS Organizations. The policy is written, the compliance report comes back green or close to it, and attention moves on.

What the tag policy buys is real, and it is worth naming before saying what it misses. Tag keys are case sensitive, so CostCenter, costCenter and costcenter are three different tags, and three different lines in a cost report. A tag policy fixes the case treatment and the allowed values for a key. That is the difference between a cost allocation report that adds up and one that quietly splits a department across three rows.

It is also a narrower job than the name suggests. The AWS Organizations user guide states it directly (AWS Organizations user guide, "Tag policies", checked July 2026):