# Designing an escalation policy

> Who gets the alert, by what channel, how long before the next person, and what never escalates.

URL: https://pagerless.dev/guides/escalation-policies
Updated: 2026-10-22

## The parts

| Decision | A good default |
| --- | --- |
| First channel | A push to a phone app with an acknowledge button |
| Wait before calling | 5 minutes |
| Second channel | A phone call, because pushes get missed in sleep |
| Wait before the next person | One more step (5 minutes) after the call |
| Who is last | Someone senior who would rather be woken than not |

## Common mistakes

- Paging a whole channel: everyone assumes someone else has it.
- Escalating noise: if it shouldn't wake person one, it shouldn't wake person two.
- No floor: a rule that can turn off alerts for a dead app will, eventually.

Pagerless's defaults are the table above. See [levels](https://pagerless.dev/docs/levels).