Abstract. The paper establishes necessary and sufficient conditions for the stability of different join-the-shortest-queue models including the load-balanced network with general input and output processes. It is shown that the necessary and sufficient condition for the stability of the load-balanced network is related to the solution of the linear programming problem precisely formulated in the paper. It is proved that if the minimum of the objective function of that linear programming problem is less than 1, then the associated load-balanced network is stable.