What an SLA credit is actually worth

Estimate a potential SLA credit separately from the business cost of an incident. Start with the applicable agreement, the eligible charges and evidence that meets its definition of unavailability. A vendor incident alone is not an approved claim.

Read the product's agreement first

The Amazon Compute SLA (opens in new tab) separates EC2 region-level and instance-level coverage. Region-level unavailability requires simultaneous loss of external connectivity across all running instances in a qualifying multi-AZ deployment. Its calculation uses unavailable minutes, not a universal five-minute rule.

For region-level uptime below 99.99% but at least 99.0%, the listed credit rate is 10%. It applies to eligible EC2 charges in the affected region, excluding one-time payments. Other products and deployment types need their own agreement.

Work through a conditional estimate

Illustrative example: assume a qualifying 30-day window, 210 unavailable minutes under that agreement, and $4,000 in eligible charges.

Window:        30 × 24 × 60 = 43,200 minutes
Availability:  (43,200 − 210) / 43,200 × 100 = 99.514%
Potential credit: $4,000 × 10% = $400

The arithmetic does not validate the assumptions. Check the actual billing window, covered resources, exclusions and evidence before using the estimate. Do not substitute total account spend for eligible charges.

The $400 also tells you nothing about lost sales or engineering time. Track those separately using reconciled business records. Counting retries as separate failed purchases can overstate the incident's cost.

Keep the filing requirements with the evidence

EC2 requests go through AWS Support Center by the end of the second billing cycle after the incident. Required details include the specified claim subject, dates and times, affected region, resource IDs and corroborating logs. AWS validates eligibility; credits generally apply to future EC2 payments. Check the full request procedure and exclusions (opens in new tab) before filing.

Give the review an owner while evidence is available. Save the source agreement, identify the records supporting each affected interval, and record the actual deadline. Keep secrets and customer content out of shared copies.

Use public records as supporting context

A vendor status report and a public endpoint measurement can support an investigation. Neither establishes the behavior of your particular resources or supplies every record a claim requires.

CheckUpstream's AWS guide is a starting point for reviewing recorded terms. Confirm those terms against the original agreement and your account's coverage. You review and submit the claim; the vendor decides whether it qualifies.

Updated September 11, 2026: corrected the EC2 scope, measurement and filing guidance; removed blanket rules for other AWS products and claims of guaranteed recovery. The example is a conditional calculation, not an eligibility decision.