When Amazon Web Services falls below its 99.99% uptime commitment, you are owed service credits. Here is exactly how the Amazon EC2 / EBS (Region-level) schedule works, and how to claim what you are due.
Service credits are calculated against your monthly bill for the affected service, based on its Monthly Uptime Percentage.
| Monthly uptime | Equivalent downtime | Service credit |
|---|---|---|
| 99.0% – < 99.99% | 4 min/mo – 7.2 hrs/mo | 10% |
| 95.0% – < 99.0% | 7.2 hrs/mo – 36 hrs/mo | 30% |
| Below 95.0% | 36 hrs/mo – 720 hrs/mo | 100% |
AWS credits are not automatic, and not every outage counts. Check each condition below before you spend time building a claim.
The EC2 Region-Level SLA (99.99%) only applies when your instances run in two or more AZs in the same Region. Single-AZ deployments fall under the lower Instance-Level SLA, so confirm which one your architecture qualifies for before you calculate.
Eligibility is measured per Region, per service, across the full billing month. A two-hour outage on one day is averaged across all 43,200 minutes of the month, so small blips rarely cross the threshold on their own.
Downtime caused by your own code, security groups, instance limits, or anything AWS classes as outside its reasonable control does not count toward the Monthly Uptime Percentage.
Accounts with overdue invoices or in breach of the Customer Agreement are ineligible until the balance is cleared.
Credits are not automatic. You have 60 days to file. Follow these steps.
Identify which AWS Region and service (EC2, RDS, S3, etc.) breached its Monthly Uptime Percentage. Each service has its own SLA schedule.
Collect CloudWatch metrics, request logs, error rates, and timestamps showing unavailability. AWS requires the dates, times, and request IDs of failed requests.
File a case in the Support Center under Account and billing, then SLA credit, within 60 days of the incident, attaching your evidence.
Approved Service Credits are applied to a future monthly bill, not refunded as cash, and only against the affected service.
Enter your spend and downtime to see what AWS owes you.
A complete evidence pack is the single biggest factor in getting a credit approved on the first pass. Tick each item off as you collect it, then export the list for your ticket.
Gather every item below before you file. Complete evidence is the single biggest factor in getting a credit approved on the first pass.
Fill in your incident details and we will write a claim email in AWS's own terms, with the credit math already worked out. Copy it, attach your evidence, and send.
Review before sending. Figures are estimates based on AWS's flagship compute SLA. Attach your evidence and verify against your current agreement.
Run your spend and downtime through the calculator, then use this guide to file inside the window.