GitHub Actions pricing in November 2026: rates and math

GitHub-hosted runners cost $0.006 a minute on Linux 2-core, $0.010 on Windows 2-core, and $0.062 on macOS. Plans include $12, $18, or $300 of compute a month. Standard runners in public repositories and self-hosted runners are free. A managed runner such as Skipbox is a flat $39 a month for unlimited minutes.

Fluxenic, the company behind Convika, makes Skipbox, so one price on this page is our own product's. Every GitHub rate and quote below comes from GitHub's own pages, read November 11, 2026 (Japan time) and linked under Sources.

• Per minute: each GitHub-hosted runner has its own rate, set by its operating system and size. Each job is rounded up to a whole minute.
• Included each month: GitHub Free has $12, GitHub Pro and GitHub Team $18, GitHub Enterprise Cloud $300. Since October 28, 2026, GitHub states it in dollars, not minutes.
• A month's bill: minutes on each runner × its rate, minus the included amount.
• Free: standard runners in public repositories, and self-hosted runners.
• Flat: Skipbox runs your jobs for $39, $79, or $149 a month, whatever the minutes.

What GitHub charges per minute, by runner

GitHub's rate card, read November 11, 2026:

Three rules sit under the table:

• Every job rounds up. "GitHub rounds the minutes and partial minutes each job uses up to the nearest whole minute." A job of 2 minutes 5 seconds bills 3 minutes.
• Larger runners need a paid organization plan. They are "only available for organizations and enterprises using the GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise Cloud plans," and "Larger runners are not free for public repositories."
• The repository's owner pays. "Usage is charged to the repository owner, not the person who triggered the workflow runs."

Storage is billed apart from minutes: $0.25 per GB a month for artifacts and Packages past the plan's allowance, and $0.07 per GB a month for Actions cache past 10 GB per repository.

Three kinds of runner, three kinds of bill

What each plan includes, now in dollars

GitHub's billing page: "The included compute usage is expressed as a monetary amount, not a fixed number of minutes or other usage units." The minutes columns divide each plan's dollars by a runner's rate:

GitHub gives the same guide itself: "$300 USD covers 50,000 minutes on a standard Linux runner at $0.006 USD per minute." A month of mixed jobs draws every job's cost from the one amount. It "resets to the full amount at the start of each billing cycle," which for Actions is 00:00 UTC on the 1st of the month.

When it resets in your time zone, and what happens when it runs out, is in are GitHub Actions free for private repositories.

How to work out a month's bill

bill = (minutes on each runner × that runner's rate, added up) − the plan's included amount

Count minutes per job, rounded up. The bill never goes below $0.

An organization on GitHub Team, one month, private repositories:

GitHub's own worked example runs the same way: on GitHub Team, 3,000 Linux minutes and 2,000 Windows minutes past the included amount cost "$38 USD ($18 USD + $20 USD)."

Two things move the number:

• Rounding. 3,000 jobs of 2 minutes 5 seconds are 6,250 minutes of work and 9,000 billed minutes.
• Failed runs. GitHub: a workflow that "fails after 5 minutes" and then succeeds on a 10-minute re-run costs 15 minutes.

To see your own numbers, open Billing & Licensing, then Usage, and group Actions by SKU. GitHub notes that the dashboard "may show your Actions usage as a dollar amount ("spend") rather than raw minutes."

What changed in 2026

On ubuntu-latest the October change moves nothing: $12 at $0.006 a minute is the 2,000 minutes GitHub Free had before. It matters on other runners. A Windows 2-core job counted double under the multipliers, so 2,000 minutes bought 1,000. At $0.010 a minute, $12 buys 1,200.

One more thing draws on the included amount in private repositories. GitHub's billing page: "Each Copilot code review consumes GitHub Actions compute in addition to AI credits."

Articles and AI answers that say "2,000 free minutes, Windows counts 2×, macOS 10×" describe the pages GitHub replaced.

Are self-hosted runners free in 2026?

Yes. GitHub's billing page, read November 11, 2026, lists "Self-hosted runners" under usage that "remains free independently and does not reduce the included compute usage." GitHub announced a charge for them on December 16, 2025 and shelved it the next day; nothing has been charged since.

GitHub's docs describe the trade: self-hosted runners "are free to use with GitHub Actions, but you are responsible for the cost of maintaining your runner machines." So teams with heavy CI put their private-repository jobs on self-hosted runners and size the machine to the build. The minutes add nothing to GitHub's bill.

Where a flat monthly price sits

A per-minute price grows with every job. A flat price is the same at any volume. Skipbox is a self-hosted runner that Skipbox operates: $39 a month for 4 vCPU and 8 GB, $79 for 8 vCPU and 16 GB, $149 for 16 vCPU and 32 GB, each with unlimited minutes and no usage charges.

Against GitHub's runner of the same size, on GitHub Team:

The break-even is (plan price + GitHub Team's $18) ÷ GitHub's rate. Against ubuntu-latest at $0.006, Skipbox S is cheaper above 9,500 job-minutes a month: ($39 + $18) ÷ $0.006.

Take the month worked out above. Its Linux jobs are 18,000 minutes and cost $144.00 on GitHub. One Skipbox S plan runs them for $39. The 1,000 Windows minutes stay on GitHub, where their $10.00 fits inside GitHub Team's $18. The month costs $39 where it cost $136, which is $97 less, and the next 10,000 Linux minutes add nothing. The plan runs one 4 vCPU job at a time, so jobs that arrive together wait their turn.

Moving a job is one line: change its runs-on: to skipbox. The trial runs one 4 vCPU job at a time for 7 days or 3,000 job-minutes, whichever comes first, and takes no card.

Start a free Skipbox trial on skipbox.dev

Where the flat price doesn't apply:

• macOS, Windows, and Arm jobs. Skipbox runs Linux x64 jobs on Ubuntu 24.04.
• Public repositories on standard runners. GitHub doesn't bill them, so Skipbox buys speed there, not savings: more vCPU, and caches kept between jobs.
• Jobs larger than 16 vCPU and 32 GB.

Per-minute prices at 7 other runner vendors are in how much GitHub Actions runners cost, and every runner with a fixed monthly price is in flat-rate GitHub Actions runners. If a budget has already stopped your jobs, see an Actions budget is preventing further use.

Related reading

• Are GitHub self-hosted runners free? Yes, in 2026
• What a self-hosted runner really costs to build and run
• How to speed up GitHub Actions: 6 fixes, in order
• Blacksmith alternatives by billing model, with prices
• Claude Code on GitHub Actions: what the minutes cost and how to cap them
• AI coding agents and your CI bill: the GitHub Actions math

Frequently asked questions

How much does GitHub Actions cost in 2026?

On November 11, 2026, GitHub-hosted runners cost $0.006 a minute on Linux 2-core, $0.010 on Windows 2-core, $0.062 on macOS, and $0.012 to $0.162 on Linux larger runners of 4 to 64 cores. Plans include $12, $18, or $300 of compute a month. Self-hosted runners are free on GitHub's bill; a managed one such as Skipbox is a flat $39, $79, or $149 a month. Fluxenic, the company behind Convika, makes Skipbox.

How many free minutes does GitHub Actions include in 2026?

GitHub includes dollars, not minutes. Each month GitHub Free has $12, GitHub Pro and GitHub Team $18, and GitHub Enterprise Cloud $300. On ubuntu-latest at $0.006 a minute, that is 2,000, 3,000, and 50,000 minutes. On Windows 2-core at $0.010, it is 1,200, 1,800, and 30,000.

Did GitHub Actions pricing change in 2026?

Twice. On January 1, 2026, GitHub cut hosted-runner prices: "price reductions of up to 39% for GitHub-hosted runners, depending on the machines they use." On October 28, 2026, the included usage became "one shared, dollar-based pool instead of a fixed number of standard runner minutes."

How do I calculate my GitHub Actions bill?

Multiply the minutes on each runner by that runner's rate, add them up, and subtract your plan's included amount. Each job rounds up to a whole minute. On GitHub Team, 12,000 minutes on ubuntu-latest, 6,000 on Linux 4-core, and 1,000 on Windows 2-core cost $72 + $72 + $10 − $18 = $136.

Are self-hosted runners still free on GitHub Actions?

Yes. GitHub's billing page lists self-hosted runners as usage that "remains free independently and does not reduce the included compute usage" (read November 11, 2026). Their minutes add nothing to GitHub's bill. You pay for the machine, or a service that runs it.

Can I pay a fixed monthly price for GitHub Actions instead of per minute?

Yes, on a runner GitHub doesn't bill. Skipbox is a managed self-hosted runner at $39, $79, or $149 a month for 4, 8, or 16 vCPU, with unlimited minutes and no usage charges. On GitHub Team it is cheaper than GitHub's runner of the same size above 4,750, 4,410, and 3,977 job-minutes a month. It runs Linux x64 jobs from public and private repositories.

Sources

Read 2026-11-11 (Japan time).

• GitHub Docs: Actions runner pricing: per-minute rates, rounding, larger runners (checked 2026-11-11)
• GitHub Docs: GitHub Actions billing: included compute by plan, the monetary-amount sentence, usage that remains free, storage rates, the worked examples, Copilot code review (checked 2026-11-11)
• GitHub Docs: Billing cycles: the billing period and the reset (checked 2026-11-11)
• GitHub Docs: GitHub-hosted runners reference: workflow labels and standard runners in private repositories (checked 2026-11-11)
• GitHub Docs: Self-hosted runners (checked 2026-11-11)
• GitHub Docs: Viewing your usage of metered products and licenses (checked 2026-11-11)
• GitHub Changelog: Reduced pricing for GitHub-hosted runners usage (2026-01-01, checked 2026-11-11)
• GitHub Changelog: Work from anywhere with a new, connected Copilot cloud experience: the dollar-based Actions entitlement (2026-10-28, checked 2026-11-11)
• GitHub Changelog: Update to GitHub Actions pricing (published 2025-12-16, modified 2025-12-17, checked 2026-11-11)
• github/docs commit ce33310e: the minute multipliers removed from the billing page (2025-12-16, checked 2026-11-11)
• github/docs commit 8e7396e5e: the minutes column replaced by included compute in dollars (2026-10-28, checked 2026-11-11)
• Skipbox: plans, sizes, unlimited minutes, the trial, private repositories (checked 2026-11-11)