# Idle Load Balancer | Cloud Efficiency Hub Canonical: https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/idle-load-balancer Provisioned load balancers continue to generate costs even when they are no longer serving meaningful traffic. By: Dann Berg Updated: 2026-09-28 [Cloud Efficiency Hub](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub) The short version Provisioned load balancers continue to generate costs even when they are no longer serving meaningful traffic. [Dann Berg](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannberg/) Cloud FinOps Lead @ Squarespace GCP service [GCP Load Balancers](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/cloud-services/gcp-load-balancers) Category [Networking](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/service-category/networking) Reference CER-0202 Type Idle or Unused Resource ## Explanation Why the waste happens and who it affects. This often occurs when applications are decommissioned, testing infrastructure is left behind, or backend services are removed without deleting the associated frontend configurations. Without ingress or egress traffic, these load balancers offer no functional value but still consume billable resources, primarily their hourly forwarding rule charges. ## Billing model The pricing dimensions that drive this cost. Load balancers in GCP are billed per hour for each forwarding rule and per GB of data processed. An idle load balancer still incurs the hourly forwarding rule charges, while data processing charges stop when there is no traffic. Static external IP addresses assigned to forwarding rules are not charged, but a static IP address left reserved after its forwarding rule is deleted is billed at the higher rate for unused addresses. ## How to detect 5 checks to find it in your estate. - Identify load balancers with little to no ingress or egress traffic over a representative time period - Review whether the load balancer is associated with active backend services or instance groups - Check if associated IP addresses are actively used or referenced by DNS records - Correlate creation or last-updated dates with known application lifecycle events (e.g., shutdowns or migrations) - Confirm with application or network owners whether the load balancer still serves an active purpose ## How to fix 4 ways to remove the waste. - Decommission load balancers that no longer serve traffic or lack associated backend services - Release reserved IP addresses tied to unused load balancers - Incorporate lifecycle tagging and auditing practices to flag test or temporary load balancers for removal - Review usage regularly to avoid accumulating idle network resources ## Documentation Vendor references for pricing and configuration. - [Cloud Load Balancing pricing cloud.google.com](https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/pricing) - [Load balancing metrics docs.cloud.google.com](https://docs.cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/metrics) - [Network pricing cloud.google.com](https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing) ## Related inefficiencies [Browse the library](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub) - GCP Cloud NAT CER-0174 ### [Idle Cloud NAT Gateway Without Active Traffic](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/idle-cloud-nat-gateway-without-active-traffic) Each Cloud NAT gateway provisioned in GCP incurs hourly charges for each external IP address attached, regardless of whether traffic is flowing through the gateway. In many environments, NAT configurations are created for temporary access... Networking - GCP Compute Engine CER-0462 ### [Unused Static External IP Address](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/unused-static-external-ip-address) A reserved static external IPv4 address that is not assigned to any resource keeps billing every hour, and Google charges a higher rate for a reserved-but-unused address than for an address in use. Addresses end up unused when the VM they... Networking - GCP Cloud NAT CER-0331 ### [Excessive Data Processing Fees on High-Throughput Cloud NAT Gateways](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/excessive-data-processing-fees-on-high-throughput-cloud-nat-gateways) Cloud NAT charges a per-GiB data processing fee on all traffic routed through the gateway - both inbound responses and outbound requests. For high-throughput workloads such as web crawlers, data pipelines, container image pulls, and... Networking --- Source: the public page above. Product screenshots and illustrative interfaces are examples, not live customer data.