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AWS Elastic Load Balancing

iScore41–60 · #2/4
aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing · Load balancing
SEPT 2026 audit

AWS's load balancers, billed per balancer-hour plus a capacity-unit charge whose rate depends on the type.

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Entry paid plan$0.0225 per load balancer-hour in us-east-1, charged for partial hours too, plus capacity units on top. There is no plan and no free allowance for the balancer itself — it bills from the hour it exists, whether traffic arrives or not.
CategoryLoad balancing

Updated 5 criteria comparedSources last checked

01.Evaluation guide

Who it suits

Balancing traffic that already lives in AWS, where the balancer reaches EC2, containers, Lambda and IP targets natively. $0.0225 an hour plus capacity, billed only on whichever dimension you actually use most rather than on all of them at once.

Consider something else if…

You want a bill you can forecast. The capacity unit is four dimensions at once — connections per second, active connections, rules and gigabytes — and the one that governs your charge can change with traffic shape rather than traffic volume.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Each value below links to the page it was read from, with the sentence it came from. Criteria AWS Elastic Load Balancing does not publish are not listed.

Pricing
3 criteria
Entry paid plan$0.0225 per load balancer-hour in us-east-1, charged for partial hours too, plus capacity units on top. There is no plan and no free allowance for the balancer itself — it bills from the hour it exists, whether traffic arrives or not.
Sources (1) →
Pricing modelPer load balancer-hour plus per capacity-unit-hour, and the capacity rate depends on which balancer you run: $0.008 per LCU-hour for an Application Load Balancer, $0.006 for a Network Load Balancer, and $0.008 per GB processed on the older Classic balancers. Reserving capacity in advance is cheaper per unit than using it on demand.
Sources (1) →
Egress over allowance$0.008 per GB processed on a Classic Load Balancer. Application and Network balancers do not bill data separately — throughput folds into the capacity unit instead, at 1 GB per hour per LCU to EC2 targets — so there is one published per-GB rate here and it applies to the oldest of the three products.
Sources (1) →
Infrastructure
1 criteria
Uptime SLA99.99% monthly uptime for a Multi-AZ Load Balancer — one spread across two or more availability zones. A balancer in a single zone is not covered by that commitment.
Sources (1) →
Inference
1 criteria
Rate limitsOne capacity unit covers 25 new connections per second, 3,000 active connections per minute (1,500 with Mutual TLS), and 1 GB per hour to EC2, container or IP targets — 0.4 GB per hour to Lambda. You are charged only on whichever of those dimensions you use most, not on all of them, and the first 10 rule evaluations are free.
Sources (1) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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Every page here is sourced and dated.