Azure AKS SLA Credits & Refunds

Microsoft publishes a separate SLA document for nearly every Azure compute service, and AKS is no exception. The catch: the credit you're owed depends on configuration choices (zone redundancy, replication tier, pricing model) most teams forget to verify after an incident. Here's what to check for AKS specifically.

What this guide covers

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

Frequently asked questions about Azure AKS SLAs

What is the typical SLA uptime guarantee for Azure AKS?

Azure guarantees 99.95% uptime for the AKS Kubernetes API server when you enable the paid Uptime SLA tier (also required for production clusters). The free tier provides a 99.9% availability target with no financial backing. If Azure fails to meet the paid commitment during a billing cycle, you are eligible to receive a portion of your AKS spend back as a service credit.

How do I claim Azure AKS SLA credits after an outage?

Submit a billing support request through the Azure portal: Help + Support → New support request → Issue type: Billing → Problem type: Service credit request. Within two months of the billing period in question, provide the affected Subscription ID and Resource ID, the start and end timestamps of the impacted period, your evidence (Azure Monitor logs, Resource Health alerts, or independent monitoring), and your calculated Monthly Uptime Percentage for AKS. Microsoft validates against its internal incident records before issuing the credit to your billing account.

What exclusions apply to the Azure AKS SLA?

Crucially, the AKS SLA only covers the managed control plane — failures in customer-managed worker nodes, node pools, or workloads scheduled on those nodes are not covered.

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

Compute outages rarely show up cleanly. An AKS 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 Azure SLA guides

Other Azure services creditable through the same portal-based billing request process:

• Azure Virtual Machines SLA credits — Compute
• Azure Azure Functions SLA credits — Compute
• Azure App Service SLA credits — Compute
• Azure Blob Storage SLA credits — Storage

Recover Azure credits without a portal grind

Azure billing support requests for AKS aren't difficult to file — they're tedious. Each one takes the same kind of subscription-ID, resource-ID, timestamp, and uptime-calculation packaging, repeated for every incident across every subscription you own.

Next Signal detects AKS SLA breaches across your Azure tenants, packages the credit request in the format Microsoft expects, and submits it. See how it works or start a free trial.