Yes. Amazon S3 has an official service-level agreement (SLA). It defines how AWS calculates monthly uptime from qualifying request errors, sets storage-class-specific service-credit tiers, and explains exclusions and the claim process. The SLA page is marked last updated November 28, 2023; check the live agreement at AWS’s Amazon S3 SLA before relying on its terms.
What the Amazon S3 SLA promises
AWS says it will use commercially reasonable efforts to make S3 available at the Monthly Uptime Percentage (MUP) specified in the agreement during each monthly billing cycle. The remedy for eligible unavailability is a service credit, calculated against applicable S3 charges in the affected AWS Region. For S3 Express One Zone, the scope is the affected Availability Zone.
This is a credit policy, not a promise that every operation, console page, network path, or customer application will always work. The SLA’s measurement is based on defined S3 request errors and is subject to exclusions.
Read the complete agreement at https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/.
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How S3 calculates Monthly Uptime Percentage
Five-minute measurement intervals
For each account and request type, AWS calculates an Error Rate in every five-minute interval. Qualifying InternalError and ServiceUnavailable responses are counted, subject to the exclusions in the SLA. An interval with no requests is treated as having a 0% error rate.
From Error Rate to MUP
Monthly Uptime Percentage is 100% minus the average of those interval Error Rates over the monthly billing cycle. Consequently, the calculation is about S3 request availability as defined by the agreement; it is not a measurement of data durability, application success, DNS, client connectivity, or every possible customer-facing outage.
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S3 service-credit tiers
The credit is a percentage of applicable S3 charges for the affected storage-class group and Region (or Availability Zone for S3 Express One Zone), not a percentage of your total AWS bill.
| Storage-class group | MUP threshold | Service credit |
|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard, S3 Express One Zone, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, S3 Glacier Deep Archive, and requests not otherwise specified | Below 99.9% but at least 99.0% | 10% |
| Same group | Below 99.0% but at least 95.0% | 25% |
| Same group | Below 95.0% | 100% |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, S3 One Zone-IA, and S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | Below 99.0% but at least 98.0% | 10% |
| Same group | Below 98.0% but at least 95.0% | 25% |
| Same group | Below 95.0% | 100% |
A threshold is evaluated against the MUP for the applicable request group and billing period. The 100% tier means 100% of eligible S3 charges in scope, not reimbursement for unrelated AWS services, business losses, or customer expenses.
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How to request an S3 SLA credit
Credits are not issued automatically. Submit a case through the AWS Support Center by the end of the second billing cycle after the incident.
- Open an AWS Support Center case for the affected account.
- Put SLA Credit Request in the case subject.
- Identify the billing cycle and AWS Region involved. For S3 Express One Zone, identify the affected Availability Zone when relevant.
- Give the incident’s start and end dates and times, with the time zone.
- Attach request logs and other information AWS needs to validate the qualifying errors and calculate uptime.
AWS verifies the MUP and the claim. The calculated credit must exceed $1. Approved credits are applied to future S3 payments, although AWS may instead credit the payment card used for the affected billing cycle.
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Important SLA exclusions and limits
- Events outside AWS’s reasonable control are excluded.
- Customer actions or inaction can disqualify an event.
- Problems caused by customer equipment, software, or technology are excluded.
- Suspension or termination under the AWS Agreement is excluded.
- The SLA states that eligible service credits are the sole and exclusive remedy unless the governing agreement says otherwise.
Keep evidence that separates an S3 service error from client-side timeouts, credentials, throttling, network routing, deployment changes, or an application defect. The SLA does not turn those causes into qualifying downtime.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Durability, availability, and the SLA are different numbers
AWS’s current S3 overview describes S3 as designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability and 99.99% default availability. Those are design figures, not the monthly credit thresholds in the SLA. See the S3 overview and AWS’s data-protection documentation.
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Many S3 classes keep data across at least three Availability Zones. S3 One Zone-IA instead stores redundant copies within one Availability Zone. Redundancy and durability reduce data-loss risk; they do not guarantee that every request will be available, nor do they change the credit bands shown above.
S3’s strong read-after-write consistency for PUT and DELETE operations is another separate property. Consistency describes what a successful operation returns; the SLA measures qualifying service errors. AWS documents consistency and S3 use cases in the S3 User Guide.
Choosing a storage class after reviewing the SLA
The SLA alone should not determine a storage-class decision. Compare the workload and the complete bill using AWS’s storage-class comparison and current S3 pricing.
- Access pattern and latency: Standard targets frequent access; IA and archive classes trade access economics for retrieval charges, delays, or both.
- Availability design and location: Check the class’s designed availability and whether data spans multiple Availability Zones.
- Retrieval and restore: Include per-request retrieval fees and any restore wait before data is usable.
- Minimums: Account for minimum storage duration and minimum billable object size where a class imposes them.
- Total workload cost: Include storage, requests, retrieval, data transfer, management and analytics, replication, and transform or query features.
Prices and plan terms change by Region. The pricing page currently describes, as of July 15, 2025, up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for eligible new customers, six-month free-plan availability, and credit expiry within 12 months of account creation; those offers are separate from the S3 SLA and eligibility must be checked on the live page.
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AWS’s 2007 announcement described an older 99.9% commitment and different credit terms. It is historical context, not the current agreement. Use the present S3 SLA page, whose displayed update date is November 28, 2023, when assessing an incident.
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