# What a GitHub Actions minute costs in 2026

The prices changed in January, and a charge for your own runners was announced and postponed. Here is what a minute costs today, how it is counted, and how to pay less.

October 9, 2026, by Supercorp.

GitHub Actions is billed by the minute, at a price that depends on the runner. The prices changed on 1 January 2026, and a second change, a charge for runners you host yourself, was announced and then postponed. This is what a minute costs today, how the minutes are counted, and what was and was not changed.

## The price of a minute

From GitHub's [price list](https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-pricing), in US dollars a minute:

| Cores | Linux x64 | Linux arm64 | Windows x64 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | $0.002 | | |
| 2 | $0.006 | $0.005 | $0.010 |
| 4 | $0.012 | $0.008 | $0.022 |
| 8 | $0.022 | $0.014 | $0.042 |
| 16 | $0.042 | $0.026 | $0.082 |
| 32 | $0.082 | $0.050 | $0.162 |
| 64 | $0.162 | $0.098 | $0.322 |

A standard macOS runner is $0.062 a minute, and the larger M2 Pro one $0.102. A 4-core Linux runner with a GPU is $0.052.

The 2-core rows (and the 1-core one) are *standard* runners. Everything with 4 cores or more is a *larger* runner, and that difference matters more than the price.

## How minutes are counted

**Each job is rounded up.** "GitHub rounds the minutes and partial minutes each job uses up to the nearest whole minute." Ten jobs of twenty seconds are ten minutes.

**Your plan includes minutes, for standard runners only.** Free has 2,000 a month, Pro and Team 3,000, Enterprise Cloud 50,000.

**Larger runners are never included.** GitHub's words: "Larger runners are always charged for, even when used by public repositories or when you have quota available from your plan." They also need the Team or Enterprise Cloud plan.

**Public repositories are free** on standard runners, without limit.

**Storage is separate.** Artifacts are $0.25 a GB a month beyond the plan's allowance. The cache is free up to 10 GB a repository, then $0.07 a GB a month.

So a team on the Team plan that runs 50,000 minutes a month on the 2-core runner pays for 47,000 of them: $282. The same minutes on the 4-core runner are all paid for, at twice the price: $600.

## What changed in 2026

**1 January: prices fell.** GitHub [reduced the prices](https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-01-reduced-pricing-for-github-hosted-runners-usage/) of its hosted runners "by up to 39%", least for the small runners and most for the large ones. The prices above are the new ones. They include a new charge of $0.002 a minute that GitHub calls the Actions cloud platform charge.

**March: the charge for your own runners did not happen.** The same announcement said that from 1 March 2026 the $0.002 would also apply to minutes on self-hosted runners, which had always been free. Within days GitHub [postponed it](https://github.com/resources/insights/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions) "to take time to re-evaluate our approach". GitHub's billing page still says today that Actions usage "is free for self-hosted runners". We found no later announcement that revives it, in GitHub's changelog up to this month.

**January: two smaller runners.** A 1-core Linux runner became generally available at $0.002 a minute, for jobs of up to 15 minutes. And arm64 standard runners came to private repositories, counted against the plan's included minutes like the x64 ones.

**June: one more thing draws on the minutes.** Copilot code review on private repositories has used Actions minutes since 1 June.

## Paying less

**Run fewer minutes.** Cancel a run when a newer commit arrives, skip workflows for files that do not affect them, and cache dependencies. This costs nothing and comes first.

**Mind the rounding.** Many tiny jobs each cost a whole minute. Steps in one job share theirs.

**Use arm64 where it works.** The same cores cost a sixth less at 2 cores, and a third less or more from 4 up.

**Use the 1-core runner** for jobs that only call an API or post a comment.

**Run the large jobs elsewhere.** The larger runners are where the bill grows, because nothing of them is included. Hosted runner services charge less per minute for the same cores, and a machine in your own cloud account costs less again: four CPUs on an AWS spot machine came to about $0.0014 a minute on 8 October 2026, against $0.012 on GitHub. Minutes on runners of your own are free on GitHub's side. We compare the two routes [with GitHub's runners](/compare/github-hosted-runners) and [with the hosted services](/compare/hosted-runner-services), and [the first post here](/blog/cheaper-github-actions-runners-aws-spot) has the whole sum for a spot machine.

SuperCI, which we make, is one way to do the last of these: it starts a fresh machine in your AWS, Cloudflare or Modal account for each job. It is open source and costs nothing itself.