Hidden cost · Last verified 2026-08-25

Load balancer data processing

Managed load balancers add a processing charge on top of instance or service time.

Official pricing: Source

This item is not in the current price snapshot. No rate is shown.

A managed load balancer is not only an hourly box in front of your fleet. AWS Application Load Balancers charge for being provisioned and for Load Balancer Capacity Units. An LCU is the maximum of four dimensions averaged over the hour: new connections per second, active connections, processed bytes, and rule evaluations. Processed bytes are therefore not a Classic-style standalone gigabyte line; they win the hour only when they dominate the other three axes. Network Load Balancers use a different LCU recipe, including processed bytes and traffic flows. None of those LCU SKUs are in this snapshot, so this page explains the trigger rather than drawing a dollar amount. Cross-AZ hops from the balancer to targets can add EC2 regional data-transfer lines on top of LCU. Azure and Google Cloud publish their own hourly plus data-processing schedules for load balancers. DigitalOcean included transfer is not an LCU. Read https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/ and https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/exploring-data-transfer-costs-for-classic-and-application-load-balancers/ before you assume the instance hour is the whole front door.