GitHub Actions pricing changes: every dated change and what it meant
Has GitHub Actions pricing changed?
GitHub has changed what Actions costs several times since 2019. The last change to the published per-minute rates took effect on January 1, 2026, when hosted runner rates fell by up to 39%, taking a standard Linux 2-core minute from $0.008 to $0.006. A $0.002-a-minute charge on self-hosted usage was announced on December 16, 2025 for March 1, 2026 and then postponed; it is not charged today. This page is the dated record of every change.
Last checked September 13, 2026: on that date GitHub’s runner pricing reference still listed the rates that took effect on January 1, 2026, and its Actions billing documentation still listed self-hosted runner usage as free. Every entry below is taken from GitHub’s own published announcement or documentation for that change, and this page is kept as a living record: what changed, when it took effect, and what it meant for a team running private repositories.
When did GitHub Actions pricing change, and what changed?
| Date | What changed | What it meant for a private-repo team |
|---|---|---|
| August 8, 2019 | Actions gains CI/CD and is announced free for public repositories, with pay-as-you-go pricing for private ones. Self-hosted runners are announced free to use. | The two-sided model every later change works on: open source costs nothing, private work is metered, and your own hardware is outside the meter. |
| November 11, 2019 | Actions becomes generally available: “free for all public repositories, and every plan gets included storage and runner minutes for private repositories.” | The included-minutes allowance starts here. From this point a private-repo bill is minutes above the quota, times a rate. |
| April 14, 2020 | GitHub changes its plans: Team drops to $4 per user with no five-seat minimum, and “GitHub Team includes 3,000 Actions minutes per month for private repositories.” Free for organizations gains private repositories. | The 3,000-minute Team allowance that most paying teams still work against was set on this date, alongside a cheaper seat. |
| June 21, 2023 | Larger hosted runners become generally available on paid Team and Enterprise Cloud. They are “charged by the job minute for both private and public repositories and do not consume included minutes.” | The first class of runner the quota never covers. A team that moved a heavy job to a bigger machine started paying from its first minute. |
| January 16, 2025 | Linux arm64 hosted runners become free in public repositories, in public preview. The labels do not work in private repositories, and a workflow that uses them there fails (superseded on January 29, 2026). | A cheaper architecture arrives for open source first; private repositories keep paying the arm64 rate. |
| October 28, 2025 | A 1 vCPU Linux runner, ubuntu-slim, enters public preview. “Jobs that use this runner type are limited to 15 minutes of execution time.” |
A cheaper standard SKU for short jobs — lint, format checks, small unit suites — if they fit inside 15 minutes. |
| December 16, 2025 | GitHub announces two changes: hosted runner prices down by up to 39% from January 1, 2026, and a new $0.002-a-minute Actions cloud platform charge. The reduction is “driven by a ~40% price reduction across all runner sizes, paired with the addition of a new $0.002 per-minute GitHub Actions cloud platform charge.” From March 1, 2026 that charge would also apply to self-hosted runner usage in private repositories, drawn from the plan's free usage quota. Public repository runner usage stays free; GitHub Enterprise Server is unaffected. | Cheaper hosted minutes, and — for the first time — a GitHub meter on machines you own and pay for yourself. |
| December 2025, days later | GitHub postpones the self-hosted half. The update on the December 16 announcement reads: “We're postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach,” and “We are continuing to reduce hosted-runners prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026.” The changelog entry carries the postponement as an undated update above the original announcement. | Self-hosted usage stays free, with no replacement date announced. The hosted price cut was unaffected. |
| January 1, 2026 | The reduced hosted runner rates take effect, “up to 39%, depending on the machines” used. Free usage minute quotas are unchanged and “standard hosted runner usage in public repositories remains free.” | A straight cut in the per-minute rate. GitHub's own estimate was that 96% of customers would see no change to their bill at all. |
| January 22, 2026 | The 1 vCPU Linux runner becomes generally available, still as ubuntu-slim and still capped at 15 minutes per job. |
$0.002 a minute becomes a supported option, a third of the standard 2-core rate for jobs that fit the cap. |
| January 29, 2026 | Linux and Windows arm64 standard runners become available in private repositories at two vCPUs, drawing on included minutes: “Because these are standard GitHub-hosted runners, usage counts towards the free minutes included in your plan.” “In private repositories, these runners have two vCPUs; in public repositories, they have four vCPUs.” | arm64 stops being an open-source-only architecture. A private-repo team can run ubuntu-24.04-arm or windows-11-arm against the same included-minute quota, at the standard arm64 rate. |
| April 27, 2026 | GitHub announces that from June 1, 2026, Copilot code review will consume Actions minutes: “GitHub Actions minutes will be consumed from your existing plan entitlement for each review that is run on private repositories, with any usage beyond your included minutes billed at standard GitHub Actions rates.” “There are no changes to public repositories, where Actions minutes remain free.” | The quota stops being only a CI budget. Reviews on private repositories now come out of the same 2,000 or 3,000 minutes. |
| June 1, 2026 | That change takes effect. | Teams at or near their quota lose headroom without changing a single workflow file. |
| September 13, 2026 | Last checked. GitHub's runner pricing reference lists the January 2026 rates unchanged, and its Actions billing documentation lists self-hosted runner usage as free with no platform charge. | Nothing to act on since June. The postponed charge has not returned. |
How much did GitHub Actions prices fall on January 1, 2026?
The headline was “up to 39%,” which is the largest cut, not the typical one. GitHub published only the headline. Against the rates in force before January 1, 2026, the change by machine was:
| Runner | Before, from the superseded reference | From January 1, 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 2-core | $0.008 | $0.006 | −25% |
| Windows 2-core | $0.016 | $0.010 | −38% |
| Linux 64-core | $0.256 | $0.162 | −37% |
| macOS 12-core | $0.120 | $0.077 | −36% |
For the commonest case — a team on GitHub Team running 12,000 standard Linux 2-core minutes a month on private repositories — the quota still covers 3,000, and the remaining 9,000 fell from $72.00 to $54.00. The cut is real, and it is a rate cut only: no extra included minutes came with it.
GitHub's own estimate of the impact was that “96% of customers will see no change to their bill. Of the 4% of Actions users impacted by this change, 85% of this cohort will see their Actions bill decrease and the remaining 15% who are impacted across all face a median increase around $13.” The increase in that last group came from the platform charge, which for hosted runners was folded into the reduced per-minute price rather than billed separately.
The current rate for every runner SKU, read the same day as this page, is on the GitHub Actions pricing page, and the cost calculator applies them to your own minutes.
Does GitHub charge for self-hosted runners?
This is the change most teams remember, and it is the one that did not happen. As announced on December 16, 2025, from March 1, 2026 every Actions job would have carried a $0.002-a-minute cloud platform charge for the orchestration GitHub provides — queueing, routing, logs, secrets — whether the job ran on GitHub's machines or on yours. Self-hosted usage in private repositories would have drawn on the plan's free usage quota and then been billed at that rate.
Days later GitHub postponed it, in an update placed on the same announcement: “We're postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach.” No replacement date has been announced since, and the billing documentation read on September 13, 2026 still lists self-hosted runner usage as free.
What that is worth, concretely: a team running 12,000 self-hosted minutes a month on private repositories would have paid the charge on the 9,000 above a 3,000-minute quota, which is $18.00 a month. Small on its own; the reason it landed badly is that it was a new meter on hardware the customer already owns. If you are budgeting a self-hosted fleet, the honest position is that the rate is not in effect and could return, so plan for the machines and the people, not for the rate. The real cost of a self-hosted runner is worked through separately.
What has not changed in GitHub Actions pricing?
Four things have survived every revision so far, and they decide most bills:
The included-minute quotas. 2,000 a month on GitHub Free and Free for organizations, 3,000 on Pro and Team, 50,000 on Enterprise Cloud. They have not moved since 2020, while the work teams run through them has.
Standard runners are free on public repositories. Every announcement since 2019 has restated it, including the December 16, 2025 announcement.
Larger runners never use included minutes. Stated at their general availability in 2023 and still stated in the billing documentation: they “are always charged for, even when used by public repositories or when you have quota available from your plan.”
Self-hosted runners are free to use. The documentation still says they “are free to use with GitHub Actions, but you are responsible for the cost of maintaining your runner machines.”
How is this page kept up to date?
Every entry above is dated from GitHub's own announcement or documentation for that change, read on the date in the last row. There are no links off this page to those sources, by choice: the dates and the quoted sentences are here so you do not have to go and find them. When GitHub changes a rate, a quota or a billing rule, a row is added and the “last checked” date at the top moves. If the date at the top is old, treat the bottom of the table as the part to verify.
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