AWS VPC SLA Credits & Refunds

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

Frequently asked questions about AWS VPC SLAs

What is the typical SLA uptime guarantee for AWS VPC?

Amazon VPC itself does not have a standalone uptime SLA — the base VPC primitive (subnets, route tables, security groups) is offered at no cost, so there are no charges to credit against. Paid VPC components do carry SLAs: NAT Gateway and VPC Endpoints are typically covered at a 99.99% Multi-AZ Monthly Uptime Percentage, and Site-to-Site VPN connections at 99.95%. For unavailability of the foundational VPC fabric you would generally claim credits against the dependent paid services (EC2, RDS, etc.) that became unreachable.

How do I claim AWS VPC 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 VPC 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 VPC SLA?

Because core VPC has no direct SLA, AWS will reject claims framed as generic "VPC outages" — you need to identify the specific paid component (NAT Gateway, VPN, Transit Gateway, VPC Endpoint, or a dependent compute or database service) that failed in order to recover credits.

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

Networking incidents are the easiest to misclassify. A VPC disruption might really be a DNS resolution issue, an upstream peering problem, or a TLS certificate failure — and the SLA only covers what the provider's own infrastructure caused. Distinguishing a true VPC outage from a downstream symptom requires correlated telemetry across multiple layers, which is exactly the data manual claim filers tend to miss.

Related AWS SLA guides

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

• AWS CloudFront SLA credits — Networking
• AWS Route 53 SLA credits — Networking
• AWS EC2 SLA credits — Compute
• AWS S3 SLA credits — Storage

Stop leaving AWS credits unclaimed

The hardest part of recovering VPC 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 VPC 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.