Service level agreement (SLA)
A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract, or a section of one, that commits a provider to measurable levels of service and sets out what happens when it falls short.
Updated November 5, 2026 · 1 min read
What it measures
- Availability: for example 99.9% uptime a month, which allows about 43 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month.
- Response time: how fast someone answers or arrives, like four hours for an emergency HVAC call.
- Resolution time: how fast a problem is fixed, often by severity level.
What makes it work
- Clear definitions: what counts as down, when the clock starts, which hours count.
- How it's measured and reported, and who does the measuring.
- Exclusions, such as scheduled maintenance or problems the customer caused.
- Remedies: usually credits off the next bill, and a right to end the contract after repeated misses.
An example
A commercial cleaning company promises to fix any missed area reported by 9 a.m. the same day, with a 5% credit for any month it misses that more than twice. Both sides know what good service means and what a miss costs.
In SignMaster
Send the SLA in the same envelope as the main service contract, or on its own as a schedule to an existing master services agreement. The library has a service level agreement template to start from.