AWS EKS SLA Credits & Refunds

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

Frequently asked questions about AWS EKS SLAs

What is the typical SLA uptime guarantee for AWS EKS?

AWS commits to a 99.95% Monthly Uptime Percentage for the standard EKS Kubernetes control plane and a higher 99.99% commitment for clusters using the Extended Support / Provisioned control plane option. Both are measured per region and trigger 10%, 25%, or 100% service credits when uptime drops below the relevant threshold.

How do I claim AWS EKS 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 EKS 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 EKS SLA?

Critically, the EKS SLA covers only the managed Kubernetes control plane — failures in customer-managed worker nodes, self-installed add-ons, or your own pods are not eligible for credits even when they cause downtime.

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

Compute outages rarely show up cleanly. An EKS workload might be partially degraded — some instances fail, others stay healthy — and the SLA only counts the portion of capacity that was actually unavailable. To prove a claim you need per-instance (or per-task) error-rate data, not just an aggregate dashboard. Most teams discover this only when their first credit request comes back denied for "insufficient evidence."

Related AWS SLA guides

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

• AWS EC2 SLA credits — Compute
• AWS Lambda SLA credits — Compute
• AWS ECS SLA credits — Compute
• AWS S3 SLA credits — Storage

Stop leaving AWS credits unclaimed

The hardest part of recovering EKS 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 EKS 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.