---
title: "Change Incident Severity"
description: "Sets the severity of an Incident Management incident by hand. The value then sticks and is no longer derived from its alerts."
---

`POST /api/im/incidents/:id/severity`

Sets an incident's severity. The incident is marked `severityManual: true`, so new alerts no longer raise or lower it automatically. If the incident is still `triggered`, its pending escalation is cancelled and re-armed at the incident's current tier under the new severity. Status pages driven by a [status page rule](/api/incident-management/statuspage-rules) and outbound integrations are notified of the change.

## Authentication

Any IM-eligible role (`admin`, `editor`, `responder`) or an organization-wide API token, see [Authentication](/api/incident-management#authentication). Incident Management must be enabled for the organization. Unlike resolve or status changes, this single-incident endpoint has no team restriction. (The `severity` action of [Bulk Update Incidents](/api/incident-management/bulk-update-incidents) does.)

## Request Body

| Field | Type | Required | Description |
|-------|------|----------|--------------|
| `severity` | string | Yes | One of `sev1`, `sev2`, `sev3`, `sev4`. |

## Example (cURL)

```bash
curl -X POST "$BASE_URL/api/im/incidents/42/severity" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "severity": "sev2" }'
```

## Response

`200 OK`: the updated incident row (same shape as the `items` of [List Incidents](/api/incident-management/list-incidents), without the enrichment fields), with `severity` set and `severityManual: true`.

```json
{
  "id": 42,
  "teamId": 3,
  "title": "Database connection pool exhausted",
  "severity": "sev2",
  "severityManual": true,
  "status": "triggered",
  "currentTier": 1,
  "escalationEpoch": 1
}
```

(Shortened; the full row is returned.)

## Common errors

- `401 Unauthorized` when not authenticated
- `403 Forbidden` (`customerScopedTokenForbidden`) when using a customer-scoped token
- `403 Forbidden` (`imAccessDenied`) when the session user has no IM-eligible role
- `403 Forbidden` (`imNotEnabled`) when Incident Management is not enabled for the organization
- `400 Bad Request` (`invalidRequestBody`) when `:id` is not a positive integer, or `severity` is missing or not one of `sev1` to `sev4`
- `404 Not Found` (`imIncidentNotFound`) when the incident does not exist, or belongs to another organization