Last updated 2026-06-04
The State of Cloud Waste 2026
By Bruno Rocha, Founder
Most organizations waste a meaningful share of their cloud bill, and the number has barely moved in years. This page combines first-party data from LevelFour with verified figures from neutral industry sources, so you can cite the numbers with confidence.
What LevelFour sees in the field
These figures come from LevelFour, based on its analysis of real customer environments. We count reducible waste across the categories we optimize, including idle and orphaned resources, over-provisioning (sized against P95 utilization so headroom is preserved), and gaps in commitment coverage. They are best-case (up to) results; actual savings depend on your current rightsizing, commitment coverage, and idle resource levels.
of AWS spend is reducible waste, based on LevelFour's analysis of hundreds of AWS accounts.
LevelFour analysis, 2026
Kubernetes cost reduction, across dozens of clusters LevelFour has optimized.
LevelFour analysis, 2026
What the broader industry data shows
| Figure | What it means | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 27% | of cloud spend is self-reported as wasted, a figure that has held between roughly 27% and 32% for years. | Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report |
| 84% | of organizations say managing cloud spend is a challenge. | Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report |
| 49% | of organizations say Kubernetes increased their cloud bill, versus 28% who saw no change. | CNCF Cloud Native and Kubernetes FinOps Microsurvey |
| 70% | name over-provisioning as the top reason Kubernetes costs rise, ahead of lack of ownership (45%) and unused resources (43%). | CNCF Cloud Native and Kubernetes FinOps Microsurvey |
| 83% | of container costs go to idle resources, split between over-provisioned cluster capacity (54%) and oversized workload requests (29%). | Datadog State of Cloud Costs 2024 |
| 10% / 20% | average CPU and memory utilization across Kubernetes clusters, so most reserved container capacity sits empty. | Datadog State of Cloud Costs 2024 |
| Top priority | workload optimization and waste reduction is the number-one FinOps priority for the second year running, cited by 50% of practitioners. | FinOps Foundation State of FinOps 2025 |
Industry figures are attributed to their publishers and are not LevelFour data. The CNCF microsurvey reflects respondents who saw Kubernetes costs change.
The takeaway
Roughly a quarter to a third of cloud spend is wasted, and Kubernetes is making it worse for about half of teams, mostly through over-provisioning. The waste is well understood; what is hard is acting on it safely and continuously. LevelFour turns that waste into merge-ready infrastructure-as-code pull requests across AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes, so the fix flows through your normal review process.
Related terms
About the author
Bruno Rocha is the founder of LevelFour. He works with engineering and FinOps teams on automating cloud and Kubernetes cost optimization across AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes.