GitHub Actions cuts hosted runner prices on Jan 1, 2026. Self-hosted runners will cost $0.002/min starting March 1, while public repos stay free.
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GitHub Actions Pricing Changes: Hosted Runners Discount and Self-Hosted Per-Minute Fees
GitHub is changing how GitHub Actions is priced, and the move will affect teams that rely on self-hosted runners. On January 1, 2026, hosted runners get a price cut. By March 1, 2026, self-hosted runners will be billed at $0.002 per minute. Public repositories will still get free Actions usage. The announcement, dated December 15, 2025, aligns pricing with actual value and usage while continuing to fund platform innovation.
To see why this matters, here’s the background on how Actions was subsidized before. In the past, customers using self-hosted runners could tap into a lot of Actions infrastructure at little or no extra cost because the GitHub-hosted runner model subsidized the burden. The new pricing makes costs explicit and tied to usage, reflecting the value to each user while keeping room for ongoing investment. GitHub says most users won’t see a bill change, about 96% unaffected, 4% affected. Of those impacted, 85% will see a decrease and 15% will face a median increase of about $13. There will also be a GitHub Actions pricing calculator to help teams estimate what they will be charged.
Technically, the change makes the split between hosted and self-hosted dynamics clearer. Hosted runners, the GitHub-provided VMs for running workflows, will have their price lowered. Self-hosted runners, which run on customer hardware or in their own clouds, will incur a per-minute charge starting March 1, 2026. In practice, that means longer workflows or more concurrent runs on self-hosted infrastructure will rack up costs by the minute. Public repository usage remains free, so open source projects that rely on Actions will not see billing changes. The pricing calculator is the go-to tool if you want a precise projection of future spend.
For developers and teams, the takeaway is more cost visibility and a chance to optimize workloads. If your CI/CD relies heavily on self-hosted runners, you’ll want to quantify actual usage and consider workflow efficiency improvements. Techniques like reducing unnecessary matrix builds, reusing runners, caching dependencies, and better scheduling can help keep costs predictable. If you can shift more tasks to GitHub-hosted runners where pricing is lower, that’s a smart move. The free tier for public repositories remains intact, so open source projects can continue to run Actions at no direct cost.
This pricing shift sits alongside broader industry trends in CI costs and governance. Compared with other CI systems, where per-minute or per-job charges are common, GitHub’s move toward per-minute billing for self-hosted runners makes the economics of running your own infrastructure clearer. It also highlights the ongoing burden of maintaining hardware for CI workloads and whether a team’s compute mix justifies on-prem, cloud, or hybrid setups. For teams already using GitHub, billing integrated with Actions nudges you toward GitHub-native workflows instead of bespoke, siloed runners.
Going forward, expect cost management to become a regular part of day-to-day development planning. Most users won't see changes, but the minority that does should run the numbers with the calculator and adjust their workflows. The message is simple: pricing for developer tooling isn't static, and teams should bake cost awareness into their CI/CD design. In other words, pricing is a first-class constraint alongside build times and reliability.
For those who want to dig deeper or verify specifics, you can read the official Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions page and explore the broader GitHub Pricing and billing docs. The official announcement is at Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions, and you can review the current pricing page at GitHub Pricing. For how billing works with Actions, see About billing for GitHub Actions. If you want to explore the broader tooling world or related items, you can visit the GitHub Actions repository and keep an eye on coverage from major outlets like TechCrunch and Ars Technica for broader context.