AWS bill line item
LoadBalancerUsage
You are being charged an hourly rate for each load balancer provisioned, plus a rate per Load Balancer Capacity Unit (LCU) consumed. LCUs are driven by whichever dimension (new connections, active connections, processed bytes, or rule evaluations) is highest that hour, not by a simple sum.
Load balancer hourly usage and LCU charge
Verified against official AWS documentation last checked
Why it shows up
The flat hourly charge is predictable, but LCUs are the confusing part: AWS bills on the single highest-consuming dimension per hour, so a spike in new-connection rate or in processed bytes can drive cost up even if the other dimensions look normal.
Bills also climb from running more load balancers than needed: one per microservice or environment instead of consolidating with listener rules or path-based routing on shared load balancers.
How to cut it
- Consolidate multiple services behind fewer load balancers using host- or path-based routing rules instead of provisioning one per service.
- Investigate which LCU dimension is driving cost via CloudWatch metrics rather than assuming it's raw traffic volume.
- Tune client connection behavior (keep-alives, connection pooling) to avoid unnecessary new-connection churn.
- Delete idle/unused load balancers left over from decommissioned environments. The hourly charge accrues regardless of traffic.
How to read a usage type
LoadBalancerUsage carries no region or direction token, so there's nothing to break down here.
Source
Source: AWS docs →Found LoadBalancerUsage on your own bill?
Drop your Cost Explorer CSV into the AWS Bill Analyzer. It'll flag line items like this one on your own bill and link straight back to the fix.
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