How to claim an SLA credit from AWS
AWS owes you a service credit when EC2, S3, RDS and other services miss their SLA. Here's the exact credit schedule, the per-service case subject AWS requires, the real filing deadline, and how to file the case.
When AWS misses an uptime commitment, it doesn't refund you automatically — it waits for you to file. Here's exactly what AWS owes, how it's calculated, the exact case subject each service's SLA demands, and how to claim it before the window closes.
The short answer
When an AWS service falls below its SLA target for the month, you're owed a service credit worth a percentage of that service's monthly bill — starting at 10% and rising to 100% for severe outages (30% at the middle tier for EC2). You claim it by opening a Billing support case in the AWS Support Center by the end of the second billing cycle after the one the incident fell in — AWS counts the window in billing cycles, not in days — citing the affected region, the incident timestamps, and the AWS incident reference. The case subject line is a stated condition and it differs per service (see below). The credit is applied to a future invoice after AWS approves it.
What AWS commits to
AWS publishes a separate SLA per service. The ones Ontracko tracks:
| Service | Monthly uptime commitment |
|---|---|
| Amazon EC2 (Multi-AZ) | 99.99% |
| Amazon DynamoDB | 99.99% |
| Amazon RDS (Multi-AZ) | 99.95% |
| AWS Lambda | 99.95% |
| Amazon S3 | 99.9% |
| Amazon CloudFront | 99.9% |
What you're owed
Credits are tiered by how far monthly uptime fell below target. Amazon EC2's published schedule is the reference example:
| Measured monthly uptime | Credit |
|---|---|
| 99.0% – under 99.99% | 10% of spend |
| 95.0% – under 99.0% | 30% of spend |
| below 95.0% | 100% of spend |
S3, CloudFront, RDS, Lambda and DynamoDB all credit 10% / 25% / 100%, with the bands set against each service's own commitment (10% below target, 25% below 99.0%, and 100% below 95.0%). Two of them publish more than one table: S3's infrequent-access classes (Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval) sit on a separate schedule whose bands start lower, and DynamoDB Global Tables have their own SLA at 99.999%. You can model your exact figure with the AWS credit calculator — enter your monthly spend and observed uptime and it returns the tier and dollar amount.
The evidence AWS expects
- Your AWS Account ID
- The affected region (e.g. us-east-1)
- The incident start and end times
- The AWS incident reference from the AWS status page
Account-specific confirmation from your AWS Health Dashboard strengthens the claim, because it shows the outage hit your account and not just the public region.
How to claim an AWS SLA credit
- Confirm the outage window and incident ID on the AWS status feed, and note the exact start and end times in your affected region.
- Identify which AWS service breached its SLA and calculate the month's uptime for it, then match it to the service's credit tier.
- Sign in to the AWS account that incurred the affected usage and open the AWS Support Center → Create case → Account and billing → Service: Billing, Category: SLA Credit Request. Set the case subject to the exact string that service's SLA requires — EC2/Compute wants
Amazon Compute SLA Credit Request – Region-Level Claim(or– Instance-Level Claim), RDS wantsAmazon RDS SLA Credit Request – Multi-AZ Claim(or– Single-DB Claim), and S3, CloudFront, DynamoDB and Lambda require only that the subject contain the wordsSLA Credit Request. The console category and the subject line are different fields. - Describe the breach in the case: state the service, region, incident reference, measured uptime, and the credit percentage you're claiming, and attach your AWS Health Dashboard confirmation.
- Submit by the end of the second billing cycle after the incident and track the case — approved credits are applied to a future invoice, not refunded to a card, and only where the credit for the billing cycle exceeds one dollar.
Watch the exclusions
AWS SLAs exclude downtime from scheduled maintenance, customer-caused issues (your own misconfiguration), and force majeure. Single-AZ deployments also carry lower commitments than the Multi-AZ figures above, so confirm the architecture the SLA applies to before you file.
Frequently asked questions
What SLA credit are you owed when AWS goes down?
A service credit equal to a percentage of the affected service's monthly fee — 10% when uptime dips just below target, 25% below 99.0% (30% for EC2), and 100% below 95.0% for every service Ontracko tracks. It's credit toward a future invoice, not a cash refund, and AWS only issues it where the amount for the billing cycle exceeds one dollar.
How long do I have to claim an AWS SLA credit?
AWS does not count this window in days. Every AWS service SLA says the same thing: the credit request must be received "by the end of the second billing cycle after which the incident occurred." So the real length depends on where in the month the outage fell — roughly 90 days for an incident on the 1st, roughly 60 for one at month-end. Ontracko works to the conservative end of that (month-end plus 60 days), which is always inside AWS's window rather than outside it.
How do I file an AWS SLA credit claim?
Open a case in the AWS Support Center under Account and billing → Billing → SLA Credit Request, with the case subject that service's SLA requires (exactly Amazon Compute SLA Credit Request – Region-Level Claim for EC2, exactly Amazon RDS SLA Credit Request – Multi-AZ Claim for RDS, and any subject containing SLA Credit Request for S3, CloudFront, DynamoDB and Lambda), citing the affected region, incident reference, and your measured uptime. See the AWS SLA guide for the per-service tiers and a calculator.
Does AWS pay SLA credits as cash?
No. An approved AWS SLA credit is applied to a future invoice for the account that incurred the affected usage, rather than refunded to your payment method.
Which AWS services have an SLA credit?
The ones Ontracko monitors include EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, DynamoDB and CloudFront, with commitments from 99.9% to 99.99%. Most other AWS services carry a service-specific SLA too — check the relevant SLA page for the exact commitment.
Methodology & caveats
The commitments and credit tiers above are transcribed from AWS's published service SLAs into Ontracko's profiles; verify the exact clause on the service's SLA page before filing, since terms differ by service and deployment architecture. Live incident history for AWS is on its status page.
*Ontracko monitors AWS's public status feed, detects SLA breaches, and assembles the claim package with evidence attached. Free — 8% only on recovered credits. See AWS live status or the AWS SLA calculator.*
Related reading
Does OpenAI or Anthropic owe you an SLA credit when the API goes down?
OpenAI prints a 99.9% uptime SLA on its Scale Tier and Fast mode pages — for Enterprise customers only — but publishes no credit schedule, no uptime definition and no claim window. Anthropic publishes nothing at all and disclaims uninterrupted service by name. Here is what each one actually owes you.
Why do SLA credit claims get denied? The six exclusions that void a claim
A real outage is not the same thing as claimable downtime. Six exclusion families — plan tier, scheduled maintenance, your architecture, minimum-duration floors, third-party carve-outs and your own configuration — decide whether a vendor pays. Here is how each one works, with the vendors that use it.
DigitalOcean SLA credit: how the 99.99% Droplet guarantee pays out (and how to claim it)
DigitalOcean's CPU Droplet SLA commits to 99.99% monthly uptime per Droplet and pays a 100% service credit below it — no tiers. Here is what counts as downtime, what the credit covers, the two-billing-cycle deadline and the exact email to send.
Does Salesforce pay SLA credits? What its agreement actually commits to
Salesforce publishes no uptime percentage, no credit schedule and no filing window — its agreement promises only commercially reasonable efforts. Here is where your Salesforce SLA actually lives, and what to do after an outage.
Or browse the SLA glossary and the reliability rankings.
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