Does Salesforce pay SLA credits? What its agreement actually commits to

Ask almost any search engine or AI assistant what Salesforce's SLA is and you will get a confident answer: 99.9% uptime, service credits if it is missed. That answer is not in any document Salesforce publishes. Here is what Salesforce actually commits to, where your real service level lives, and what to do when your org goes down.

The short answer

Salesforce publishes no availability percentage, no credit schedule and no claim deadline. Its agreement commits only to *commercially reasonable efforts* to keep the purchased services available around the clock, excepting planned downtime and events outside its reasonable control — a best-efforts obligation with no number attached to it. That does not mean Salesforce owes you nothing. It means your commitment and your remedy are governed by your own Master Services Agreement and Order Form, negotiated per customer, rather than by a public tariff. If Salesforce was down and you want a credit, the document to open is your Order Form, not a web page.

What Salesforce actually commits to

Salesforce's Main Services Agreement contains an availability clause, and it is an effort standard rather than a metric. Salesforce undertakes to use commercially reasonable efforts to make the online purchased services available 24/7, with two carve-outs: planned downtime for which it gives advance electronic notice, and unavailability caused by circumstances beyond its reasonable control (force majeure, ISP failure, denial-of-service attacks, non-Salesforce applications, and so on).

Read that clause carefully and notice what is missing:

Four of those five rows are blank not because Salesforce is silent on service levels, but because it moves all of them onto the customer's paper. That is a genuinely different SLA architecture from AWS or Google Cloud, where the percentage and the tariff are public and identical for every customer.

Why does everyone say Salesforce guarantees 99.9%?

Two reasons, and neither is Salesforce.

The first is measured performance being mistaken for a contractual promise. Salesforce publishes a live status and incident history at status.salesforce.com, and the availability it actually delivers is high. But what a vendor achieves is not what it commits to — a strong track record creates no entitlement to a credit. See what a 99.9% SLA actually allows for why the two get conflated so often.

The second is copying. Vendor-comparison listicles fill the Salesforce row from the SaaS default, other pages copy that row, and answer engines trained on the result repeat the figure with total confidence. The number propagates because nobody goes back to the primary document.

We are not above this. Ontracko's own Salesforce SLA page published a sentence claiming a 99.9% monthly uptime commitment in its FAQ structured data until 6 September 2026. The 99.9 was our internal monitoring default — the figure we score availability against when a vendor gives us nothing better — and it leaked onto a public page as though it were a contractual term. It is now removed, and the page states no percentage for Salesforce at all. If you are relying on any Salesforce uptime figure you did not read off your own contract, treat it the same way.

So where is your Salesforce SLA?

In your Order Form or a service-level addendum to your Master Services Agreement. When you open it, find these five things:

• The committed availability percentage, and whether it applies per org, per cloud, or per instance.
• The measurement period — monthly and quarterly commitments behave very differently for the same outage.
• The credit schedule: what percentage of fees, tiered by what uptime bands, applied to what.
• The claim window and what it runs from — the incident date, or the end of the measurement period. This is the difference between a live claim and a dead one, and it is the single most common way credits are forfeited.
• The exclusions, especially scheduled maintenance windows and sandbox instances, which are routinely carved out.

If none of that is in your paperwork, you are on the standard best-efforts clause and there is no credit to claim — which is itself worth knowing before your next renewal, because it is negotiable.

How to claim a Salesforce SLA credit

1. Open your Order Form or MSA service-level addendum and read the availability clause. Note the committed percentage, the measurement period, the credit bands and the filing window — every step below is measured against those, not against a public figure.
2. Pull the incident record from Salesforce Trust at status.salesforce.com. Capture the Trust incident ID, the affected instance, and the exact start and end timestamps.
3. Confirm the outage hit your instance. Salesforce reports availability per instance, so an incident on a pod you are not on does not support your claim.
4. Compute the period's availability for your instance against the percentage in your contract, and identify which of your negotiated credit bands it lands in.
5. Assemble the evidence pack: Org ID, instance name (for example NA85), Trust incident ID, incident timestamps, and the contract clause you are claiming under.
6. File a Salesforce support case citing the clause and the Trust incident ID, and copy your account executive — negotiated credits are usually settled through the account team rather than through support triage alone.
7. Track it against your own contract's deadline. Because the window is contractual rather than published, nobody will warn you when it closes.

Watch the exclusions

The two that most often defeat a Salesforce claim: scheduled maintenance windows, which are announced in advance and excluded by the availability clause, and sandbox instances, which are generally outside the commitment entirely. A painful sandbox outage during a release cycle is real disruption and is usually not claimable.

Slack, and the rest of the Salesforce family

Slack is a Salesforce company, and its SLA is drafted in the same voice — only more so. Slack's published Service Level Agreement commits to commercially reasonable efforts to keep the Slack services available 24/7, excepting planned downtime and circumstances beyond reasonable control. That is the entire document. It attaches no availability percentage, defines no service credit, and sets no claim deadline, so there is nothing to file for a bad month. Any Slack uptime figure or credit schedule you find elsewhere did not come from Slack's terms. As with Salesforce, whatever service level you actually hold is the one negotiated into your own agreement. See Slack's SLA page and Slack live status.

The wider pattern is worth internalising: an SLA can be published and still be unenforceable, and an unpublished SLA can be worth real money. Which SaaS vendors actually pay SLA credits sorts the vendors we track by which of the two they are.

Frequently asked questions

Does Salesforce pay SLA credits?

Salesforce publishes no standard service credit, so there is no public tariff to claim against. Credits do exist where a customer has negotiated them into their Master Services Agreement or Order Form, and those are real and payable. Whether you are owed one is answered by your own contract, not by a Salesforce web page.

What is Salesforce's uptime SLA?

Salesforce states no availability percentage in anything it publishes. Its agreement commits only to commercially reasonable efforts to make the purchased services available 24/7, excepting planned downtime and events beyond its reasonable control. Any specific percentage attributed to Salesforce came from somewhere other than Salesforce's own terms.

Is the Salesforce 99.9% uptime guarantee real?

Not as a contractual commitment. Salesforce frequently delivers availability in that range and publishes its record on Salesforce Trust, but delivered performance is not a promise and creates no entitlement to a credit. The 99.9% figure circulating on comparison pages and in AI answers is not a Salesforce term.

How long do I have to claim a Salesforce SLA credit?

There is no published window, because there is no published credit. Your deadline is whatever your Order Form or MSA addendum sets, and you should read it before you need it — contractual windows are often short and, unlike published ones, nothing external reminds you they exist.

Am I owed a credit if Salesforce was down for two hours?

Only if your own agreement contains an availability commitment that those two hours breach, over that agreement's measurement period. Two hours in a 30-day month is roughly 99.7% availability, which would breach a 99.9% monthly commitment — but only if you hold one. Check the clause first, then the arithmetic.

Does Slack have an SLA with service credits?

Slack publishes an SLA, but it contains no percentage, no credit and no claim process — only a commercially-reasonable-efforts commitment. There is no published Slack service credit to claim.

Does the Salesforce SLA cover sandbox instances?

Generally no. Sandbox instances and announced scheduled maintenance windows are standard exclusions, so outages confined to a sandbox are usually not claimable even under a negotiated commitment.

Methodology & caveats

Salesforce's absence of a published availability percentage, credit schedule and filing window, the commercially-reasonable-efforts framing of its availability clause, the scheduled-maintenance and sandbox exclusions, the evidence set (Org ID, instance, Trust incident ID, timestamps) and the support-case claim route are transcribed from Salesforce's published agreements into Ontracko's vendor profile, which states no figure for Salesforce because Salesforce states none. The same applies to the Slack SLA description above. Salesforce revises its agreements, and negotiated customer terms differ from the standard ones by design — read your own Order Form before asserting any number or deadline. Salesforce's incident record is on its status page and its profile on our Salesforce SLA page; for vendors that do publish a tariff and support a live credit calculator, see AWS, the reliability rankings, what an SLA credit is and the SLA glossary.

*A Salesforce claim is not blocked by a missing public tariff — it is blocked by a missing incident record. Ontracko watches the Salesforce status feed for free, times every incident against your instance, and hands you the dated evidence pack your Order Form's clause is argued from. Monitor Salesforce free — 8% only on recovered credits. See Salesforce live status or open the Salesforce SLA page.*