AWSCostAWS cost · idle load balancers
Idle load balancers cost ~$16/month each - even with zero traffic
A load balancer is easy to create and even easier to forget. You spin one up for a test environment, or in front of a service you later migrate, and then you move on. The environment gets torn down. The service moves behind a new endpoint. The load balancer stays - pointed at nothing, routing nothing, billing every hour anyway. It never breaks, so nobody deletes it. Meanwhile it charges about $16/month for the privilege of existing.
An idle load balancer costs about $16/month at the base hourly rate ($0.0225/hour, us-east-1), or closer to $22 with a few LCUs - even with zero traffic and no healthy targets. AWS bills it for existing, not for working. Find the ones with no healthy targets and no requests, confirm nothing points at them, and delete them.
How much is an idle load balancer really costing?
Small per hour, steady per year, and it multiplies with every stack nobody cleaned up:
| What | Cost | Note |
|---|---|---|
| One idle ALB | ~$16/month | $0.0225/hr base, us-east-1, zero traffic |
| Same ALB per year | ~$197/year | just to keep an unused endpoint alive |
| Five forgotten LBs | ~$80/month | the usual result of old test stacks |
| After deleting them | $0 | no traffic means nothing to lose |
Why do idle load balancers pile up?
Because a load balancer with no targets looks identical to a healthy one in a list - same name, same hourly charge, no error. It is the same pattern as a stopped instance still billing its disk: the resource outlived its purpose, nothing flags it, and the meter keeps running. Nobody decided to keep paying for it. It just never got deleted.
How do I find and remove idle load balancers?
List every load balancer, then find the ones doing nothing. Two signals give it away: no healthy targets, and a RequestCount of zero over the last few weeks. This lists them all and then pulls the request count for one - a flat zero means nothing is using it. Before you delete, confirm no DNS record still points at its address:
# every load balancer in the region
aws elbv2 describe-load-balancers \
--query 'LoadBalancers[].{Name:LoadBalancerName,Type:Type,State:State.Code,ARN:LoadBalancerArn}' \
--output table
# requests handled by one, over a window you set (zero = idle)
aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics \
--namespace AWS/ApplicationELB --metric-name RequestCount \
--dimensions Name=LoadBalancer,Value=app/my-lb/0123456789abcdef \
--start-time 2026-06-08T00:00:00Z \
--end-time 2026-07-08T00:00:00Z \
--period 86400 --statistics SumWant to know what is running in your account with nothing behind it? Connect your account read-only and see what it is wasting, in real dollars.
The role can only read - Get, Describe, List, nothing else. Read the exact permissions before you deploy it, and delete the stack whenever you want.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an idle load balancer cost?+
About $16/month for an Application Load Balancer at the base hourly rate ($0.0225/hour in us-east-1), even with zero traffic and no healthy targets. With a few LCUs it is closer to $20 to $22/month. Network Load Balancers are priced similarly. The charge is for the load balancer existing, not for what flows through it.
Do I pay for a load balancer with no traffic?+
Yes. AWS bills a load balancer by the hour for as long as it exists, regardless of traffic. A load balancer with zero requests and no healthy targets still costs roughly $16 to $22/month until you delete it.
Why do I have load balancers I am not using?+
They outlive what they served. A test environment gets torn down but its ALB is left behind. A service is migrated behind a new load balancer and the old one is never deleted. A blue-green cutover finishes and the idle half keeps billing. None of them show up as a problem, so they sit there for months.
How do I find idle load balancers?+
List every load balancer, then check each one for healthy targets and for request traffic. A load balancer with no healthy targets, or with a RequestCount of zero over the last few weeks, is doing nothing but billing. The console shows target health directly; CloudWatch RequestCount confirms whether anything is actually using it.
Is it safe to delete an idle load balancer?+
If it has had zero requests and no healthy targets for weeks, deleting it is low risk - nothing is routing through it. The one thing to check first is DNS: make sure no record still points at its address. Once you confirm nothing resolves to it, delete it.
What is an LCU on my load balancer bill?+
A Load Balancer Capacity Unit - the usage-based part of ELB pricing, on top of the hourly charge. It bundles new connections, active connections, processed bytes, and rule evaluations. An idle load balancer uses almost no LCUs, which is why its cost is basically the flat hourly rate.
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