GitHub Actions Pricing 2026: Minutes, Runners, Fees

GitHub Actions is free on public repositories and on self-hosted runners. For private repositories, each plan includes minutes on GitHub-hosted runners (2,000 on Free, 3,000 on Pro and Team, 50,000 on Enterprise Cloud) and bills beyond them per minute: $0.006 for a standard Linux 2-core runner, $0.010 for Windows and $0.062 for macOS. A five-developer team on the $4-a-seat Team plan running 8,000 Linux minutes a month pays $50; the same minutes on macOS cost $330.

Every figure here was read on GitHub's Actions billing and runner pricing pages, the plans page and the GitHub changelog on October 17, 2026, in USD. This page is the invoice for Actions alone: what each plan includes, what every runner costs per minute, what storage adds, and which rules move the bill. The four-vendor comparison at a fixed volume is in CI/CD pricing compared, and the platform choice is in GitHub vs GitLab.

Toolradar data: the CI/CD ranking on Toolradar, the software directory we run, tracks 115 CI/CD tools as of October 2026, and 86% of them are free, freemium or open source. GitHub Actions sits in that majority, with the twist that its free allowance depends on the repository being public or the runner being yours. The directory record is GitHub on Toolradar.

Included minutes are per account, not per seat: a ten-person Team organization shares 3,000 minutes, not 30,000. Minutes reset to zero at the start of each month and do not roll over.

What is free, and what the "free" label hides

Three things cost nothing. Standard GitHub-hosted runners on public repositories are free, with no minute cap. Self-hosted runners are free on any repository: you pay for your own machines, not for GitHub orchestrating them. And every plan's included minutes are free up to the quota on private repositories.

The first hidden rule is the spread between runners. GitHub bills every runner at its own per-minute rate, and the standard rates in the table below run from Linux at the bottom to macOS at about ten times the price. Overage on a 3,000-minute allowance therefore costs very different amounts depending on whether you ship a web backend or an iOS app.

The second is rounding. The billing page is explicit that minutes and partial minutes are rounded up to the nearest whole minute per job, so a pipeline of ten 70-second jobs bills twenty minutes, not twelve.

The third hidden rule is payment. GitHub's docs state that if an account has no valid payment method on file, usage is blocked once the quota is used up. A team on Free that hits 2,000 minutes with no card attached does not get a bill; its private workflows stop until the month resets.

Per-minute rates for every GitHub-hosted runner

GitHub cut hosted runner prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026, and the rates below are the post-cut list, read on October 17, 2026.

Two things to take from the table. arm64 is consistently cheaper than x64 at the same core count, by a third at 4 cores ($0.008 against $0.012) and by about 40% at 64 cores, so a build that compiles cleanly on arm64 is the first saving to take. And larger runners are priced roughly in proportion to cores, which means they only pay for themselves when the job scales with cores: an 8-core Linux runner costs 3.7 times the standard 2-core, so it must finish the same job in under 27% of the time to be cheaper, not merely faster.

What a month costs: four computed bills

The bills below use list rates on private repositories and Linux 2-core as the default runner. Seat prices are the first-12-months rates GitHub prints on its plans page.

The macOS line is the one that changes decisions. An iOS team pays more than six times a Linux team for the same minutes, which is why mobile shops are the first to move builds to a self-hosted Mac mini, where Actions orchestration costs $0. Linux teams weighing the same move can price the hardware in best cheap VPS and DigitalOcean vs Hetzner. A single Mac running 8,000 minutes a month would otherwise cost $496 in standard macOS runner time alone.

Storage adds a smaller line. Artifacts and Packages above the plan's included amount cost $0.25 per GB a month, and Actions cache above its 10 GB allowance costs $0.07 per GB a month, as does custom image storage. A Team organization that keeps 10 GB of build artifacts pays $2 a month for the 8 GB above its 2 GB allowance; it is the retention setting, not the rate, that matters, because old artifacts keep billing until the retention window deletes them.

The self-hosted charge that was announced and then postponed

In December 2025 GitHub announced a $0.002 per minute "cloud platform charge" for self-hosted runner minutes on private repositories, to start on March 1, 2026, alongside the hosted-runner price cuts. GitHub said 96% of customers would see no change to their bill. The hosted cuts went ahead on January 1, 2026; the self-hosted charge did not. GitHub's changelog now states that it is postponing the self-hosted billing change to re-evaluate its approach, and the billing docs read "GitHub Actions usage is free for self-hosted runners" on the day this page was written.

What that means for a team weighing a self-hosted fleet: the economics today are your hardware against GitHub's per-minute rates, with nothing on top. The tooling to run that fleet is covered in best self-hosting tools. Budget for the possibility that the $0.002 charge returns, which at 100,000 self-hosted minutes a month would add $200, still far below the $600 the same minutes cost on hosted Linux 2-core runners.

Copilot code review now spends Actions minutes

Since June 1, 2026, each Copilot code review on a private repository consumes GitHub Actions minutes from the plan's entitlement, in addition to the AI credits it costs on the Copilot side. Reviews on public repositories stay free. GitHub does not publish a fixed minute count per review, and larger or self-hosted runners bill at their own rates, so a team that turns on automatic review for every pull request should watch the Actions usage report in the first month. The Copilot side of that bill is in GitHub Copilot pricing and the Copilot review.

How to keep the Actions bill flat

Move what you can to public or self-hosted. Open-source components build free on public repositories, and a self-hosted runner costs $0 in Actions fees. How the Actions allowance stacks up against other free developer quotas is in cloud free tiers compared. For macOS work this is the single biggest lever on the page.

Pick arm64 where the toolchain allows. Linux 2-core arm64 is a sixth cheaper than x64 at $0.005 a minute, and the gap widens on larger runners.

Shorten jobs before buying cores. Caching dependencies, splitting tests across a matrix and skipping unchanged paths all reduce billed minutes at the standard rate; a larger runner only wins when the job is CPU-bound enough to beat the price ratio.

Mind the rounding. Many short jobs round up badly. Five separate 30-second jobs bill five minutes; merged into one 150-second job they bill three, a saving of two minutes every run.

Set artifact retention. Storage is cheap per GB, but artifacts accumulate silently; a short retention window keeps the line near zero.

For the alternatives at a fixed volume, CI/CD pricing compared prices GitHub against CircleCI, GitLab and Buildkite, and best CI/CD tools covers fit beyond price.

Methodology

Every rate and allowance on this page was read on GitHub's Actions billing documentation, runner pricing reference, plans page and changelog on October 17, 2026. The four computed bills are our arithmetic on those list rates, at the first-12-months seat prices, on private repositories; the break-even ratio for larger runners is the per-minute price ratio and nothing else. The 115-tool count is Toolradar's CI/CD ranking that month. This page reports published prices only and carries no sponsored placement. How this site publishes is on the Devshot about page.

FAQ

How much does GitHub Actions cost in 2026?

Nothing on public repositories or self-hosted runners. On private repositories, Free includes 2,000 GitHub-hosted minutes a month, Pro and Team 3,000, and Enterprise Cloud 50,000; above that, a standard Linux 2-core runner costs $0.006 a minute, Windows $0.010 and macOS $0.062. Seats are $4 per user a month on Team and $21 on Enterprise for the first 12 months.

Is GitHub Actions free for private repositories?

Partly. Every plan includes a monthly minute allowance that applies to private repositories, 2,000 minutes on Free, and self-hosted runners are free regardless of repository. Once the allowance is used, private workflows either bill at the per-minute runner rate or, if no payment method is on file, stop until the month resets.

How much do macOS runners cost on GitHub Actions?

$0.062 a minute for the standard 3 or 4-core macOS runner, $0.077 for the 12-core x64 runner and $0.102 for the 5-core M2 Pro, about ten times the standard Linux rate. A team using 5,000 macOS minutes beyond its allowance pays $310 a month, which is why iOS teams often self-host a Mac.

Did GitHub start charging for self-hosted runners?

No. GitHub announced a $0.002 per minute charge for self-hosted runner minutes on private repositories for March 1, 2026, then postponed it to re-evaluate the approach. As of October 2026 the billing docs state that Actions usage is free for self-hosted runners, while the January 2026 hosted-runner price cuts of up to 39% did take effect.

Are larger runners worth the price?

Only when the job scales with cores. An 8-core Linux runner at $0.022 a minute costs 3.7 times the standard 2-core runner, so it has to finish in under 27% of the time to cost less. arm64 larger runners are cheaper at every size, $0.014 for 8 cores against $0.022 on x64.

Does Copilot code review use Actions minutes?

Yes, since June 1, 2026. Each Copilot code review on a private repository consumes Actions minutes from the plan entitlement on top of its AI credits; reviews on public repositories remain free. GitHub does not publish a fixed per-review minute count.

Cite this: Devshot, "GitHub Actions Pricing 2026: Minutes, Runners, Fees", October 2026.

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