# Self-hosted GitHub Actions runner pricing (2026)

GitHub charges nothing for self-hosted runners. The cost is the machines and whatever starts them: from about $140 for 100,000 minutes on spot, against $1,200 on GitHub's runners.

Sources read on October 27, 2026.

GitHub charges nothing for jobs on self-hosted runners. In December 2025 it announced a $0.002-a-minute charge for self-hosted runners on private repositories from March 2026, then postponed it, saying it would "re-evaluate our approach"; it has not taken effect. What a self-hosted runner costs is the machine it runs on, plus whatever tool starts and stops those machines.

## What it costs, by way of running them

Prices are per minute for Linux on x64 with 4 vCPUs. The last column is a month of 100,000 such minutes.

| How | Machines | Tool's charge | 100,000 minutes a month |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| GitHub-hosted larger runner, for comparison | GitHub's | $0.012 a minute | $1,200 |
| Your own always-on machines | Yours, running all month | None | The machines, busy or idle |
| Actions Runner Controller | Pods in your Kubernetes cluster | None (open source) | Your cluster's share |
| terraform-aws-github-runner | EC2 machines per job | None (open source) | About $140 on spot, plus Lambda and upkeep |
| RunsOn | EC2 machines per job, mostly spot | €300 to €3,600 a year | About $150 on spot, plus €25 to €300 and about $7 for its control plane |
| WarpBuild BYOC | Machines in your AWS, GCP or Azure account | $0.002 a minute | Your machines plus $200 |
| SuperCI | Machines per job in your AWS, Cloudflare or Modal account | None (MIT) | About $140 on AWS spot; between jobs only a small function waits |

The spot figures are about $0.0014 to $0.0015 a minute for 4 vCPUs in us-east-1 in October 2026, with the disk and public address counted in. Spot prices move through the day and by region.

## What the price leaves out

**Someone has to look after it.** Hosted runners need nothing. Self-hosted ones need machine images kept current, quotas raised, and someone to look when a job waits for a runner. The tools above differ mostly in how much of that they do for you.

**Idle time.** Machines that run all month cost the same whether jobs run or not. Starting a machine per job, as the per-job tools do, means paying only while jobs run, at the cost of a start-up wait.

**Security.** A self-hosted runner runs the job's code with the job's secrets on your machine. GitHub advises against self-hosted runners on public repositories, where anyone can open a pull request; per-job machines that are thrown away afterwards limit the damage a job can do.

## Questions

### Does GitHub charge for self-hosted runners?

Not now. The $0.002-a-minute charge announced for March 2026 was postponed and has not taken effect. GitHub did not say it would never charge; check its billing documentation for the current state.

### What is the cheapest way to self-host GitHub Actions runners?

Machines started per job on spot capacity, with a free tool: about $0.0014 a minute for 4 vCPUs on AWS, against GitHub's $0.012. The terraform module and SuperCI charge nothing; RunsOn adds a yearly licence; WarpBuild BYOC adds $0.002 a minute.

### Are self-hosted runners cheaper than Blacksmith or other hosted services?

Per minute, yes: about $0.0015 on spot against $0.0025 to $0.012 for hosted services. Hosted services include the upkeep and their own caches, and several have free minutes, so for small workloads they can cost less overall.

## Sources

Read on 27 October 2026.

- [The Register on GitHub's self-hosted runner charge](https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/17/github_charge_dev_own_hardware/): the announcement, its scope and the postponement, with GitHub's words.
- [GitHub's runner pricing](https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-pricing): hosted runner prices.
- [Security hardening for GitHub Actions](https://docs.github.com/actions/security-guides/security-hardening-for-github-actions): self-hosted runners and public repositories.
- [RunsOn pricing](https://runs-on.com/pricing/): licences, spot prices and the control plane's cost.
- [WarpBuild pricing](https://www.warpbuild.com/pricing): the BYOC price.
- SuperCI: [SuperCI vs the Terraform module](/compare/terraform-aws-github-runner), [SuperCI vs Actions Runner Controller](/compare/actions-runner-controller), [Cheaper GitHub Actions runners on AWS spot](/blog/cheaper-github-actions-runners-aws-spot) for a month's sum with the disk and address.