Elastic Load Balancing pricing calculator
ALB, NLB, GWLB & CLB Costs. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How Elastic Load Balancing pricing works
What you pay for
- Per load balancer hour (ALB/NLB $0.0225, GWLB $0.0125, CLB $0.025 in us-east-1).
- Capacity units per hour: ALB LCU ($0.008) is the highest of new connections, active connections, processed bytes and rule evaluations; NLB NLCU ($0.006); GWLB GLCU ($0.004); CLB per GB processed.
- Public IPv4 addresses on internet-facing load balancers, cross-AZ transfer to targets (ALB to targets in other AZs is free; NLB cross-zone is charged), ALB with Lambda targets, mTLS and Trust Store features.
Common cost traps
- Each load balancer has a fixed hourly fee; one ALB per microservice adds about $16/month each before LCUs.
- Internet-facing load balancers use a public IPv4 address per AZ, billed at $0.005/hour each.
- Large responses and long-lived connections drive LCUs more than request count.
- NLB cross-zone load balancing is billed as cross-AZ data transfer.
Ways to reduce cost
- Share one ALB across services with host- and path-based rules (up to the rule limit).
- Delete load balancers for retired environments; they bill even with no targets.
- Use CloudFront in front of ALBs to cut processed bytes for cacheable content.
- Prefer ALB for HTTP and NLB only where you need TCP/UDP or static IPs.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. Legacy accounts: 750 hours per month shared between Classic and Application Load Balancers, 15 GB processed for CLB and 15 LCUs for ALB, for 12 months. New-plan accounts pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Elastic Load Balancing?
Application, Network, Gateway and Classic Load Balancer hours and capacity units (LCU/NLCU/GLCU) are eligible usage and are offset by credits. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $28.11 | 355.7 mo. | 889.4 mo. | 3,557.5 mo. |
| Medium | $284.70 | 35.1 mo. | 87.8 mo. | 351.2 mo. |
| Large | $3,577.00 | 2.8 mo. | 7.0 mo. | 28.0 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
1 ALB 24/7 averaging 2 LCUs | ALB hours: 730 hours x $0.0225 = $16.43; ALB LCUs: 1,460 LCU-hours x $0.008 = $11.68 | Total ~$28.11/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
3 ALBs averaging 10 LCUs each, 1 NLB averaging 10 NLCUs | ALB hours: 2,190 hours x $0.0225 = $49.27; ALB LCUs: 21,900 LCU-hours x $0.008 = $175.20; NLB hours: 730 hours x $0.0225 = $16.43; NLB NLCUs: 7,300 NLCU-hours x $0.006 = $43.80 | Total ~$284.70/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
10 ALBs averaging 40 LCUs, 4 NLBs averaging 50 NLCUs, 2 GWLBs averaging 20 GLCUs | ALB hours: 7,300 hours x $0.0225 = $164.25; ALB LCUs: 292,000 LCU-hours x $0.008 = $2,336.00; NLB hours: 2,920 hours x $0.0225 = $65.70; NLB NLCUs: 146,000 NLCU-hours x $0.006 = $876.00; GWLB hours: 1,460 hours x $0.0125 = $18.25; GWLB GLCUs: 29,200 GLCU-hours x $0.004 = $116.80 | Total ~$3,577.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Elastic Load Balancing pricing FAQ
What is an LCU?
A Load Balancer Capacity Unit measures the highest of four dimensions in an hour: new connections, active connections, processed bytes and rule evaluations. You pay $0.008 per LCU-hour for ALB in us-east-1.
Does an idle load balancer cost money?
Yes, the hourly fee (about $16.43/month for an ALB) and its public IPv4 addresses bill whether or not it receives traffic.
Is the 750-hour ELB free tier still offered?
Only for accounts created before 15 July 2025, during their first 12 months.
Do credits cover ELB?
Yes, all ELB charges are eligible usage.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.