How GitHub Actions pricing works: standard runners are free on public repositories, private repositories get a monthly allowance of included compute ($12 on Free, $18 on Pro and Team, $300 on Enterprise Cloud), and usage past it is billed per minute at $0.006 for Linux, $0.010 for Windows and $0.062 for macOS. Storage is a second meter billed by the hour, $0.25 per GB-month for artifacts and $0.07 for cache above 10 GB per repository, and self-hosted runners carry no GitHub charge.

One thousand minutes costs $2 on a 1-core Linux runner, $6 on 2-core Linux, $10 on Windows, $62 on macOS
The same 1,000 minutes on each standard GitHub-hosted runner, at the per-minute rates published on docs.github.com, read on 20 September 2026 and unchanged on 12 November 2026.

Actions has no seat fee and no pipeline fee. It has a meter on compute time and a meter on stored bytes, and the rate on the first meter changes by a factor of ten depending on which runner label you typed.

This page states the rules and the rates as GitHub publishes them, with the date each one was read. If you want the arithmetic done for you, the GitHub Actions cost calculator prices your own minute counts at these same rates.

Rule one: standard runners are free on public repositories

GitHub's billing documentation puts this plainly: the use of standard GitHub-hosted runners is free in public repositories, for GitHub Pages and for Dependabot. There is no minute cap attached to that sentence, which is why open source projects run enormous matrices without ever seeing an invoice.

The exception is the one that catches people. Larger runners are never free on public repositories, whatever your plan. A public repository that switches a job to a 16-core runner starts paying $0.042 a minute on a workflow that was free the day before.

Rule two: private repositories get an allowance, and it resets monthly

Every account gets a monthly allowance of included compute for GitHub-hosted runners on private repositories, plus artifact and cache storage allowances. The allowance resets at the start of each billing cycle, and usage is charged to the repository owner rather than to the person who triggered the run.

Since 28 October 2026 the allowance is a dollar amount rather than a minute count: $12 on Free, $18 on Pro and Team, $300 on Enterprise Cloud. Each runner spends it at its own rate, so $18 is 3,000 standard Linux minutes, 1,800 Windows minutes or 290 macOS minutes, and a single busy repository can spend it in a week. The same pool now also pays for Copilot cloud sandboxes and, on Team and Enterprise Cloud, for larger runners.

Plan Included compute a month Artifact storage Cache storage per repository
GitHub Free $12, or 2,000 Linux minutes 500 MB 10 GB
GitHub Pro $18, or 3,000 Linux minutes 1 GB 10 GB
GitHub Free for organizations $12, or 2,000 Linux minutes 500 MB 10 GB
GitHub Team $18, or 3,000 Linux minutes 2 GB 10 GB
GitHub Enterprise Cloud $300, or 50,000 Linux minutes 50 GB 10 GB

Allowances read from GitHub Actions billing on 12 November 2026; the minute figures are the dollar amount divided by the $0.006 Linux rate, which is how GitHub's own guide states it. The switch to a dollar pool is the 28 October 2026 changelog entry. Artifact storage is shared with GitHub Packages; cache storage is a separate 10 GB per repository on every plan.

Rule three: past the allowance, you pay by the minute and by the machine

The rate depends on the operating system and the core count, and every job is rounded up to the whole minute. These are the standard runner rates in force since 1 January 2026, when GitHub reduced hosted runner prices by up to 39 percent and folded a $0.002 per minute Actions cloud platform charge into the listed numbers.

Read the last column before you plan anything. A macOS minute is 10.3 times a standard Linux x64 minute, and a Windows minute is 1.7 times one. Those ratios, not the absolute rates, are what decide where your money goes, and they are why a mostly-macOS bill is the most common shape of a large Actions invoice.

Standard runner Per-minute rate Cost of 1,000 minutes Against Linux x64
Linux 1-core x64 $0.002 $2.00 0.33x
Linux 2-core arm64 $0.005 $5.00 0.83x
Linux 2-core x64 $0.006 $6.00 1x
Windows 2-core x64 $0.010 $10.00 1.7x
Windows 2-core arm64 $0.010 $10.00 1.7x
macOS 3-core or 4-core $0.062 $62.00 10.3x

Rates read from Actions runner pricing on 12 November 2026, unchanged since 20 September. The ratio column is those rates divided by the $0.006 Linux 2-core x64 rate.

Larger runners are a separate pricing regime

Larger runners are available to organizations on GitHub Team and GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and they are billed on their own terms: they are not free for public repositories, and the rate scales with the cores. Until 28 October 2026 included minutes could not pay for them at all; now their cost draws from the same dollar allowance as standard runners, so a 16-core job spends a Team plan's $18 in about 430 minutes. Linux x64 runs from $0.012 at 4 cores to $0.252 at 96 cores, and Windows costs roughly twice the Linux rate at every size.

The arm64 tier is the one worth knowing about, because it is cheaper than x64 at every size rather than more expensive: $0.008 against $0.012 at 4 cores, $0.014 against $0.022 at 8, $0.098 against $0.162 at 64. If your toolchain is already multi-architecture, that is a third off the compute line for a one-word change in the runner label, and the GitHub Actions cost reduction page covers what a cheaper runner changes on top of that.

GitHub also publishes GPU runners at $0.052 a minute for 4-core Linux and $0.102 for 4-core Windows, and larger macOS runners at $0.077 for the 12-core and $0.102 for the 5-core M2 Pro.

Larger runner size Linux x64 Linux arm64 Windows x64
4-core $0.012 $0.008 $0.022
8-core $0.022 $0.014 $0.042
16-core $0.042 $0.026 $0.082
32-core $0.082 $0.050 $0.162
64-core $0.162 $0.098 $0.322
96-core $0.252 not published $0.552

Per-minute rates read from Actions runner pricing on 12 November 2026, unchanged since 20 September. arm64 is published up to 64 cores only.

The second meter: storage

Storage accrues hourly, not monthly, and it keeps accruing after you stop looking at it. Artifacts and GitHub Packages share one allowance and cost $0.25 per GB-month above it. The Actions cache is a separate 10 GB per repository and costs $0.07 per GB-month above that, measured at the peak usage in each hour. Custom images for larger runners cost $0.07 per GB-month.

The detail that catches teams out is that deleting artifacts stops future charges but does not erase charges already accrued this cycle. GitHub's own example: 10 GB of artifacts held for ten days and then deleted still bills 2,400 GB-hours for the month. Short retention set in the workflow beats a cleanup script run in a panic, and reducing your GitHub Actions costs has that setting alongside six other changes ordered by what they save.

Storage type Included Price above the allowance
Artifacts and GitHub Packages 500 MB to 50 GB by plan, shared $0.25 per GB-month
Actions cache 10 GB per repository, every plan $0.07 per GB-month
Custom images for larger runners 75 GB on Team, 150 GB on Enterprise Cloud $0.07 per GB-month

Storage rates and allowances read from GitHub Actions billing on 12 November 2026.

What changed in 2026, and what did not

On 16 December 2025 GitHub announced two changes. Hosted runner prices would fall by up to 39 percent on 1 January 2026, and from 1 March 2026 a $0.002 per minute Actions cloud platform charge would apply to self-hosted runner usage in private repositories.

The price cut happened. The self-hosted charge did not: GitHub postponed it, in its own words, "to take time to re-evaluate our approach", and on 12 November 2026 the billing documentation still lists self-hosted runners as usage that "remains free". If you are budgeting for next year, the position to plan on is that self-hosted runners cost you nothing in GitHub fees today and that a $0.002 per minute charge has been drafted, announced and shelved once. What a self-hosted GitHub runner really costs works through the rest of that bill, which is your own compute and the hours someone spends on the fleet.

What did change later in the year is the allowance, not the rates. Copilot code review has drawn on it for private repositories since 1 June 2026, and since 28 October it is a shared dollar pool rather than a minute count. GitHub Actions pricing changes in 2026 has each change with its date.

FAQ

Is GitHub Actions really free?

It is free on public repositories when you use standard GitHub-hosted runners, with no minute cap, and it is free for GitHub Pages and Dependabot builds. On private repositories it is free only up to the included compute in your plan, $12 a month on Free and $18 on Pro and Team, which is 2,000 or 3,000 standard Linux minutes. Larger runners are never free on public repositories.

How much do GitHub Actions runners cost?

Standard runners cost $0.006 a minute for Linux 2-core x64, $0.005 for Linux 2-core arm64, $0.002 for the 1-core Linux runner, $0.010 for Windows and $0.062 for macOS. Larger Linux runners run from $0.012 a minute at 4 cores to $0.252 at 96 cores. Those were the published rates on 12 November 2026.

What do GitHub Actions larger runners cost?

Between $0.012 and $0.252 a minute on Linux x64, $0.008 to $0.098 on Linux arm64, and $0.022 to $0.552 on Windows, plus $0.077 for the 12-core macOS runner and $0.102 for the 5-core M2 Pro. Since 28 October 2026 it can draw from the included compute on Team and Enterprise Cloud, and it is charged on public repositories as well as private ones.

What will be the impact of the change in Actions pricing?

The January 2026 change cut hosted runner prices by up to 39 percent, so a hosted-only bill went down. The change that would have raised bills, a $0.002 per minute platform charge on self-hosted runner usage announced for 1 March 2026, was postponed and has not taken effect. Budget on the current rates, and keep an eye on the changelog rather than on rumors.

References