diff --git a/changelogs/fragments/s3_bucket_fix_non_str_tags.yaml b/changelogs/fragments/s3_bucket_fix_non_str_tags.yaml
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..7a6e0e9f657
--- /dev/null
+++ b/changelogs/fragments/s3_bucket_fix_non_str_tags.yaml
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+---
+bugfixes:
+  - s3_bucket - Prior to 2.6 using non-text tags worked, although was not idempotent. In 2.6
+    waiters were introduced causing non-text tags to be fatal to the module's completion.
+    This fixes the module failure as well as idempotence using integers as tags.
diff --git a/lib/ansible/modules/cloud/amazon/s3_bucket.py b/lib/ansible/modules/cloud/amazon/s3_bucket.py
index e170d8538d9..4ff462d2035 100644
--- a/lib/ansible/modules/cloud/amazon/s3_bucket.py
+++ b/lib/ansible/modules/cloud/amazon/s3_bucket.py
@@ -230,6 +230,8 @@ def create_or_update_bucket(s3_client, module, location):
         module.fail_json_aws(e, msg="Failed to get bucket tags")
 
     if tags is not None:
+        # Tags are always returned as text
+        tags = dict((to_text(k), to_text(v)) for k, v in tags.items())
         if current_tags_dict != tags:
             if tags:
                 try: