Last verified April 2026 · 8 min read
GitHub Actions pricing 2026: the complete cost model
TL;DR · APRIL 2026 RATES
Per-plan included minutes
| Plan | Price | Included min/mo | Storage | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 2,000 | 500 MB | Public repos: unlimited minutes |
| Pro | $4/user/mo | 3,000 | 1 GB | Individual developers |
| Team | $4/user/mo | 3,000 | 2 GB | Organisations, SAML, advanced permissions |
| Enterprise | $21/user/mo | 50,000 | 50 GB | Compliance features, audit log, SAML, IP allowlist |
Additional minutes beyond the included allocation are billed at the per-minute rates above. Storage overages are billed at $0.25/GB/month. Large runners (8-core, 16-core, 64-core) have separate, higher per-minute rates not listed above.
The 2026 self-hosted platform fee
GitHub introduced a $0.002 per minute platform fee on self-hosted runner minutes in March 2026. This is a fee paid to GitHub for the orchestration layer on top of the infrastructure cost of running your own runners. It is not a mistake or a beta feature. It is the new pricing reality for self-hosted runner deployments.
Who this affects: any team running actions-runner-controller, philips-labs terraform-aws-github-runner, or any other self-hosted runner configuration connected to GitHub Actions. The fee applies to the minutes the workflow consumes on a self-hosted runner, billed at $0.002 per minute on top of whatever your EC2 or Kubernetes infrastructure costs.
For a team consuming 25,000 self-hosted minutes per month, the platform fee adds $50/month. For a team at 100,000 minutes, it adds $200/month. This shifted the break-even calculation: at common team scales, external runners like Depot ($0.004/min) or BuildJet ($0.003/min) now beat the platform fee plus EC2 cost below roughly 50,000 minutes per month.
BEFORE vs AFTER (25,000 min/mo self-hosted on c6i.xlarge spot)
The honest conclusion: for most teams under 100,000 minutes per month, the self-hosted path now costs more than a managed external runner once you account for engineer time and the platform fee. See self-hosted runners for the full break-even analysis.
OS multiplier deep dive
The multiplier system is the most common source of billing surprises on GitHub Actions. The base rate is the Linux x86 rate ($0.008/min). Every other OS type is a multiplier of that base.
LINUX ARM · x0.5 MULTIPLIER · $0.004/min
GitHub-hosted ARM Linux runners bill at 0.5x since AWS Graviton pass-through pricing was introduced in 2024. For a pure Linux workload, switching to ARM cuts your CI bill in half. See the full ARM runners guide.
WINDOWS · x2 MULTIPLIER · $0.016/min
Windows licensing cost is passed through. If you have significant Windows workloads, Azure DevOps at $0.007/min or $40/parallel job is typically cheaper. This is a real migration to consider if your bill is Windows-driven.
MACOS · x10 MULTIPLIER · $0.080/min
Apple hardware leasing at cloud scale explains the 10x multiplier. A 10-minute macOS build consumes 100 of your included minutes. For iOS/macOS development, self-hosting Mac Minis (MacStadium, Scaleway, Hetzner Apple Silicon) is typically cheaper above 5,000 macOS minutes per month. Depot also offers macOS runners at $0.04/min (0.5x GitHub hosted).
The included-minute trap
The most commonly misunderstood detail in GitHub Actions billing: the included minutes for your plan are Linux-equivalent minutes, consumed at the OS multiplier rate.
EXAMPLE: GitHub Team plan, 3,000 included minutes/mo
A team running daily iOS builds on the Team plan will almost certainly exceed their included minutes every month and pay macOS overage. This is the surprise that shows up on the second billing cycle.
Optimisation checklist
50% cost reduction, most standard workloads work without changes
npm, pnpm, yarn, maven, gradle, cargo, pip, composer recipes
Skip workflows when unrelated files change. 20-40% typical saving
Cancel superseded builds on force-push. 20-40% saving on active teams
4x Docker build time reduction in common scenarios
Depot, BuildJet, Blacksmith: 40-70% cheaper than GitHub-hosted
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