Azure Bastion incurs continuous hourly charges from the moment it is deployed until the resource is deleted — regardless of whether any connections are actively being made. This means a Bastion host sitting idle in a development or test environment generates the same cost as one actively serving remote sessions. Because there is no ability to pause or stop a Bastion deployment, the only way to eliminate charges is to delete the resource entirely.

This inefficiency is especially common in non-production environments where Bastion may have been provisioned for occasional troubleshooting or administrative access but then left running indefinitely. Teams often deploy Bastion during initial environment setup and forget about it, or assume it only costs money when sessions are active. Over time, these idle deployments quietly accumulate significant charges — particularly when deployed at the Basic, Standard, or Premium SKU tiers, which use dedicated infrastructure and carry meaningful hourly rates.

The cost impact compounds across an organization with multiple subscriptions or environments. A single idle Bastion host may seem modest in isolation, but dozens of forgotten deployments across dev, test, staging, and sandbox environments can represent a substantial and entirely avoidable expense.