AWS Aurora SLA Credits & Refunds

The Aurora SLA is one of the more nuanced commitments AWS publishes, partly because database services have multiple availability tiers depending on how you deploy them. This guide breaks down which Aurora configurations qualify for credits, the calculation method AWS uses, and the operational data you'll need to win a claim.

What this guide covers

• The official AWS Aurora uptime commitment and credit tiers
• Which incidents qualify (and which exclusions silently disqualify claims)
• How to file an Aurora credit request inside the AWS claim window
• Why manual claim recovery typically leaves money on the table

Frequently asked questions about AWS Aurora SLAs

What is the typical SLA uptime guarantee for AWS Aurora?

AWS commits to a 99.99% Monthly Uptime Percentage for Multi-AZ Aurora clusters and 99.9% for Single-AZ clusters. Falling below those thresholds triggers tiered service credits (10% credit at 99.0-99.99%, 25% at 95.0-99.0%, and 100% below 95.0%) against your Aurora charges in that region.

How do I claim AWS Aurora SLA credits after an outage?

Open a billing case in the AWS Support Center within 60 days of the affected billing period (the exact window is in the Aurora SLA itself). The case needs: the affected resource IDs, timestamps of the disruption in UTC, your monitoring evidence (CloudWatch metrics, error logs, or third-party uptime monitoring) cross-referenced against the AWS Health Dashboard, and your calculation of the Monthly Uptime Percentage. AWS reviews the case manually and applies any granted credit to your next invoice rather than refunding cash. Teams that file these regularly automate the evidence-gathering step because it's the most error-prone — a claim missing the wrong field gets denied and has to be refiled.

What exclusions apply to the AWS Aurora SLA?

Notably for Aurora, a Single-AZ cluster failure does not qualify under the Multi-AZ 99.99% commitment — only the lower 99.9% Single-AZ tier applies, so architecture choice directly affects what you can claim.

Why is it difficult to get refunds for Aurora outages manually?

Database SLAs get complicated because read availability, write availability, and replication health are often measured separately. A Aurora outage that prevents writes but allows reads may qualify for a partial credit, or none at all, depending on the precise wording. The evidence required (query error rates, connection failures, replication lag from your monitoring) has to match the SLA's definition of unavailability exactly.

Related AWS SLA guides

Other AWS services that share the same claim window and Support Center workflow:

• AWS RDS SLA credits — Database
• AWS DynamoDB SLA credits — Database
• AWS Redshift SLA credits — Database
• AWS EC2 SLA credits — Compute

Stop leaving AWS credits unclaimed

The hardest part of recovering Aurora credits isn't the SLA — it's the lag between an outage and the moment somebody on your team has the bandwidth to file the case. By the time the FinOps team gets around to it, the evidence has rolled out of CloudWatch and the billing window is closing.

Next Signal watches AWS Health and your own observability data, detects Aurora SLA breaches in real time, assembles the evidence package the way AWS expects it, and files the billing case for you. See how it works or start a free trial.