Check Agent Availability

Before starting a session, you can check the availability of your chat agents and then provide your users with more accurate expectations.

The legacy chat product is scheduled for retirement on February 14, 2026, and is in maintenance mode until then. During this phase, you can continue to use chat, but we no longer recommend that you implement new chat channels. To avoid service interruptions to your customers, migrate to Messaging for In-App and Web before that date. Messaging offers many of the chat features that you love plus asynchronous conversations that can be picked back up at any time. Learn about chat retirement in Help.

If you use the Permitted Domains setting in your Chat deployment, you’ll get unreliable information from the chat availability check in the SDK. For instance, the agent availability status may always return false. If you want to use Permitted Domains for your web chat deployment, we strongly advise that you create a separate deployment for the Service SDK.

To check whether agents are available, call the determineAvailabilityWithConfiguration method on the chatCore property, similar to how you start a chat session.

In Swift:

In Objective-C:

To understand the algorithm used for the estimated wait time, see the estimated wait time documentation in the Chat REST API Developer Guide.