AWS RDS SLA Credits & Refunds

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

Frequently asked questions about AWS RDS SLAs

What is the typical SLA uptime guarantee for AWS RDS?

AWS commits to a 99.95% Monthly Uptime Percentage for Multi-AZ RDS deployments and 99.5% for Single-AZ instances (at the Instance-Level). Service credits scale at 10%, 25%, and 100% as uptime drops below the relevant tier. Aurora has its own separate, higher-tier SLA.

How do I claim AWS RDS 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 RDS 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 RDS SLA?

Critically, the higher 99.95% Multi-AZ commitment only applies if you actually run a Multi-AZ deployment — Single-AZ instances that fail during an AZ outage are evaluated against the lower 99.5% Instance-Level tier, and customer-initiated reboots or failovers triggered by parameter group changes are also excluded.

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

Database SLAs get complicated because read availability, write availability, and replication health are often measured separately. A RDS 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 Aurora 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 RDS 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 RDS 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.