Paste a line item from your invoice and find what it bills for, across the Google Cloud services covered so far.
Load Balancer Forwarding Rule and Data Processing
A Google Cloud load balancer bills in two parts.
There is an hourly charge for forwarding rules whether or not anything uses them, and a per-gigabyte charge for data it processes. The hourly part is why a forgotten test load balancer costs money for months.
Billed: An hourly charge for forwarding rules (the first five priced together, then per rule) plus a per-gibibyte data-processing charge. Envoy-based load balancers, such as internal Application Load Balancers, bill per proxy instance instead.
What triggers this charge
- Every forwarding rule that exists, billed hourly, regardless of traffic. Zero requests is not zero cost. Up to five rules in a project bill as one charge, counted separately for global and regional rules.
- Internal Application Load Balancers, which bill a minimum of three proxy instances per forwarding rule, more as traffic grows, instead of the forwarding-rule charge.
- All data processed by the load balancer, on top of any egress charge for the same bytes.
- Ingress controllers in Kubernetes, each of which typically creates its own load balancer, a cluster with many Ingress objects can accumulate a surprising number.
How to reduce it
Delete idle load balancers
Forwarding rules with no traffic for 30 days are almost always left over from a test or a decommissioned service. This is the cleanest saving in the whole networking family.
Consolidate Ingress objects
A single Ingress with host- or path-based routing replaces many. Up to five forwarding rules in a project cost the same as one, so this saves on forwarding rules only past five. For internal Application Load Balancers, each forwarding rule brings at least three billed proxy instances, so merging saves sooner.
Match the network tier to the requirement
The load balancer's own rates do not drop with a regional or Standard Tier setup. The saving is on the internet egress line: Standard Tier, available with regional external load balancers, bills less per gigabyte than Premium Tier. For a single-region service with regional users, that is often enough.
Rates
Sources and review
- Explanation reviewed:
- 1 Nov 2026, against Cloud Load Balancing pricing and Google Cloud networking pricing.
- Rates verified:
- not yet. No rate is shown on this page until one is loaded from the Cloud Billing Catalog API.
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