AWS EBS SLA Credits & Refunds

The EBS SLA is one of the more nuanced commitments AWS publishes, partly because storage services have multiple availability tiers depending on how you deploy them. This guide breaks down which EBS 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 EBS uptime commitment and credit tiers
• Which incidents qualify (and which exclusions silently disqualify claims)
• How to file an EBS credit request inside the AWS claim window
• Why manual claim recovery typically leaves money on the table

Frequently asked questions about AWS EBS SLAs

What is the typical SLA uptime guarantee for AWS EBS?

EBS is covered under the Amazon Compute Service Level Agreement alongside EC2. AWS commits to a 99.99% Monthly Uptime Percentage at the Region level (across multiple AZs) and 99.5% at the Single-AZ / volume level, with tiered credits of 10%, 25%, or 100% when uptime falls below the relevant threshold.

How do I claim AWS EBS 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 EBS 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 EBS SLA?

For EBS specifically, the Region-Level 99.99% commitment only applies when you operate volumes attached to instances across multiple Availability Zones — a single impaired volume or AZ-bound deployment falls under the lower 99.5% tier.

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

Storage SLAs hinge on request-level error rates, not whether the service is "up." If EBS returns elevated 5xx errors for a subset of requests in a window, that's the kind of disruption the SLA covers — but you have to demonstrate the error rate from your own logs, not just point at a status-page banner. The cloud provider's incident timeline usually understates the customer-visible duration, so independent observability is what makes or breaks the claim.

Related AWS SLA guides

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

• AWS S3 SLA credits — Storage
• AWS EC2 SLA credits — Compute
• AWS RDS SLA credits — Database
• AWS Aurora SLA credits — Database

Stop leaving AWS credits unclaimed

The hardest part of recovering EBS 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 EBS 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.