How to fix Error: Saved plan is stale in Terraform

Remove the saved plan file from your working directory. This is the quickest solution for local development:

rm tfplan

Or if your plan file has a different name:

rm [plan-filename]

This prevents Terraform from attempting to use outdated plan data.

Create a fresh plan based on the current state:

terraform plan -out=tfplan

This reads the latest state and compares it against your current configuration. Any changes since the previous plan will be captured in the new plan file.

Apply the newly generated plan:

terraform apply tfplan

Since this plan was just created, it matches the current state and will apply successfully.

If you're in a CI/CD pipeline and the state has changed between stages, use -reconfigure to force Terraform to detect the current state:

terraform init
terraform plan -out=tfplan
terraform apply tfplan

Always run terraform init in CI/CD pipelines to ensure plugin cache and backend configuration are properly set up before planning.

To understand what caused the state to change, compare the old and new plans:

terraform show -no-color tfplan.old > tfplan.old.txt
terraform plan -no-color > tfplan.new.txt
diff tfplan.old.txt tfplan.new.txt

This shows you what infrastructure differences Terraform detected between plan generations.