As organizations migrate from the Basic to the Standard tier of Azure Load Balancer (driven by Microsoft’s retirement of the Basic tier), they may unknowingly inherit cost structures they didn’t previously face. Specifically, each load balancing rule—both inbound and outbound—can contribute to ongoing charges. In applications that historically relied only on Basic load balancers, outbound rules may never have been configured, meaning their inclusion post-migration could be unnecessary.
This inefficiency tends to emerge in larger Azure estates where infrastructure-as-code or templated environments create load balancers in bulk, often replicating rules without review. Over time, dozens or hundreds of unused or outdated rules can accumulate, inflating network costs with no operational benefit.
Azure Standard Load Balancer incurs hourly charges for each configured load balancing rule beyond the first five, as well as for each configured outbound rule and each data processed unit. Unlike the retired Basic tier (which had no per-rule charges), the Standard tier's billing is tied directly to the number of rules. This makes it important to assess the necessity of each rule, especially in environments with many load balancers or frequent replication across dev, QA, and staging.
