# What is a cost center?

> A cost center is an organizational unit — a team, department, or project — that costs are assigned to for budgeting and accounting. In Databricks, cost centers rarely map one-to-one to workspaces or clusters, so attribution (tags, identity mappings, allocation rules) is what actually connects the bill to them.

- Canonical: https://lakesentry.io/glossary/cost-center/
- Published: 2026-07-15

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The accounting concept is old and simple; the cloud version is a mapping problem. A Databricks workspace might serve six cost centers; one cost center might span three workspaces, two clouds, and a shared SQL warehouse. The org chart and the infrastructure disagree, and the bill follows the infrastructure.

Closing that gap is what attribution does: tags where they're enforced, identity mappings for the people and service principals running work, allocation rules for whatever's shared. The cost-center hierarchy (org unit → department → team is a common shape) then becomes something spend can be rolled up into: for [showback](/glossary/showback/) reports, budgets, or full [chargeback](/glossary/chargeback/).

**Try this:** pick one month's Databricks bill and ask what fraction of it lands in a named cost center without manual research. That percentage is your attribution coverage, and it's the number to improve before any billing conversation.