How does conflict affect aid? We argue that aid flows do not provide an accurate picture of the aid community’s legacy in conflict countries because aid flows do not inform about aid dependency, which is an often used, but not clearly defined or quantifiable, term. In this paper, we propose a quantifiable concept of aid dependency that is similar to epidemiology’s distinction between incidence (aid flows) and prevalence (aid dependency) rates. We then calculate for a sample of 101 countries their aid dependency levels and show that conflict is a driver of aid dependency. Our aid dependency concept may be useful for estimating the aid community’s necessary commitment in post-conflict countries to prevent the economy from stalling.