How many free GitHub Actions minutes do private repositories get in 2026?

GitHub no longer gives private repositories a number of minutes. Each plan includes a dollar amount of compute a month: $12 on GitHub Free (personal accounts and organizations), $18 on GitHub Pro and GitHub Team, and $300 on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, which in GitHub's words "is expressed as a monetary amount, not a fixed number of minutes or other usage units" (read on November 9, 2026). On ubuntu-latest, at $0.006 a minute, that comes to 2,000, 3,000 and 50,000 minutes a month; on Windows, macOS and larger runners it is fewer, and public repositories on standard runners don't use it at all.

Skipbox publishes this guide and sells a self-hosted runner, whose minutes don't draw on this amount. GitHub's figures below come from GitHub's own pages and its docs repository, read on November 9, 2026, and linked under Sources.

The included amount, by plan and by runner

The minutes each plan's dollars buy if every job ran on one runner, at GitHub's rates read on November 9, 2026:

GitHub's own guide: "As a guide, $300 USD covers 50,000 minutes on a standard Linux runner at $0.006 USD per minute." What each runner has in cores, memory and disk is in ubuntu-latest runner specs.

Three things the table leaves out:

• Mixed runners share one amount. A month of Linux and Windows jobs takes each job's cost from the same dollars, at its own runner's rate.
• Minutes are rounded up per job. GitHub "rounds the minutes and partial minutes each job uses up to the nearest whole minute", so 30 jobs of 10 seconds each use 30 minutes.
• Larger runners need GitHub Team or Enterprise Cloud. They are "only available for organizations and enterprises using the GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise Cloud plans", and only there does their cost draw on the included amount.

Storage has its own allowances, apart from compute: artifact storage of 500 MB on GitHub Free, 1 GB on Pro, 2 GB on Team and 50 GB on Enterprise Cloud (shared with GitHub Packages), and 10 GB of cache per repository on every plan.

What changed on October 28, 2026

Until October 28, 2026, GitHub's billing page listed minutes: 2,000 a month on GitHub Free, 3,000 on Pro, 2,000 on GitHub Free for organizations, 3,000 on Team and 50,000 on Enterprise Cloud. That day, commit 8e7396e5e in GitHub's docs repository replaced that column with "Included compute usage (per month)" of $12, $18, $12, $18 and $300, and added the sentence quoted above. The October entries of GitHub's Actions changelog don't mention it.

On ubuntu-latest the number didn't move: $18 at $0.006 a minute is 3,000 minutes, as before. What changed is how other runners count. They draw their own rate from the same dollars.

Why AI answers and older articles say "2,000 minutes, Windows 2×, macOS 10×". GitHub's billing page carried a "Minute multipliers" table (Linux 1, Windows 2, macOS 10) until December 16, 2025, when commit ce33310e in the same repository removed it, and the minutes table until October 28, 2026. An answer built from an older copy repeats both. GitHub's docs for GitHub Enterprise Server still show the minutes column. On GitHub.com today, each runner has its own rate: Windows 2-core is $0.010 a minute and macOS $0.062, against $0.006 for Linux 2-core.

What never counts against it

GitHub lists these as free, apart from the included amount:

• Standard GitHub-hosted runners in public repositories. GitHub: this usage "remains free independently and does not reduce the included compute usage".
• Self-hosted runners, in the same sentence. The per-minute charge GitHub announced for them in December 2025 never started: are self-hosted runners free.
• Standard runners used by GitHub Pages and by Dependabot.

And what does count, which people miss:

• Larger runners, in private and public repositories alike.
• Copilot code review on private repositories. Its runner cost "draws from your account or organization's included compute usage", and usage past it is billed at standard Actions rates. On public repositories, "this usage remains free".
• Failed and cancelled jobs, for the minutes they ran. GitHub's example: a workflow that fails after 5 minutes, then succeeds on a 10-minute re-run, costs 15 minutes.

When it resets

The included compute "resets to the full amount at the start of each billing cycle", and for metered products such as Actions the cycle "starts at 00:00:00 UTC on the first day of each month". It resets to the full amount, so what's left at the end of a month doesn't carry over. When GitHub Actions minutes reset has more time zones and how to keep CI running until then.

What happens past it

It depends on how the account is set up:

• A payment method on file, no budget that stops usage. Jobs keep running, and GitHub bills each minute at the runner's rate.
• No payment method. "If your account does not have a valid payment method on file, usage is blocked once you consume the included compute usage." What to do when it happens.
• A budget set to stop usage when it's spent. Jobs stop starting until the budget is raised or the month ends. What to do when it happens.

How to check what's left

• An organization: its Billing & Licensing page, then Usage (or Metered usage), shows the usage of every metered product, Actions included.
• A personal account: github.com/settings/billing.
• Emails before it runs out: "GitHub can send email notifications when the included usage for your plan reaches 90% and 100% during a billing period." Owners and billing managers turn them on.

Billing & Licensing shows the amount in dollars. To turn dollars back into minutes on each runner, and to read the usage report CSV, see how GitHub Actions billing works.

More private-repository minutes at a flat price

A self-hosted runner's minutes don't draw on the included amount, on any plan. Skipbox is a self-hosted runner that Skipbox operates: each job runs in a fresh Linux x64 VM in Finland or Germany (EU), destroyed after it, and you move a job by changing its runs-on line to skipbox.

Plan S is $39 a month however many minutes you run, for jobs of 4 vCPU and 8 GB. On GitHub Team, above about 9,500 job-minutes a month that is less than the same minutes on ubuntu-latest; plans M ($79) and L ($149) run larger jobs. On GitHub Free, on GitHub Pro and on personal accounts the included amount differs, and so does that number: the cost calculator works it out from your own jobs, and the page for personal accounts shows it for yours.

Skipbox runs private repositories only, and Linux x64 jobs only: macOS, Windows and Arm jobs stay on GitHub's runners and draw on the included amount as before.

You can try it on your own jobs first: free for 7 days or 3,000 minutes, no card.

Sources

All read on 2026-11-09.

• GitHub Docs, GitHub Actions billing: the included compute by plan in dollars, the "monetary amount" sentence, the $300 guide, what's free, storage, Copilot code review, the payment-method rule, failed jobs.
• GitHub Docs, Actions runner pricing: per-minute rates, rounding up per job, larger runners on GitHub Team and Enterprise Cloud only.
• GitHub Docs, Billing cycles: the cycle starts at 00:00:00 UTC on the first day of the month.
• GitHub Docs, Budgets and alerts: included-usage emails at 90% and 100%.
• GitHub Docs, Viewing your usage of metered products and licenses.
• github/docs, commit 8e7396e5e (October 28, 2026): the minutes column replaced by included compute in dollars.
• github/docs, commit ce33310e (December 16, 2025): the minute multipliers removed from the billing page.
• GitHub Changelog, Actions entries.

Updated November 9, 2026