GitHub Actions Usage Limits Overview | Generated by AI
GitHub Actions Usage Limits
GitHub Actions has tiered limits based on your plan (personal accounts or organizations). These include free monthly minutes for GitHub-hosted runners in private repositories and storage for artifacts. Public repositories and self-hosted runners don’t consume these minutes. Limits reset monthly for minutes (storage is ongoing). Overages are billed automatically if you have a valid payment method; otherwise, jobs are blocked after hitting the limit.
Included Minutes and Storage by Plan
| Plan | Storage | Minutes (per month) |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Free (personal/org) | 500 MB | 2,000 |
| GitHub Pro (personal) | 1 GB | 3,000 |
| GitHub Team (org) | 2 GB | 3,000 |
| GitHub Enterprise Cloud (org) | 50 GB | 50,000 |
- Minutes: Count total job runtime on GitHub-hosted runners (partial time for failed jobs). Multipliers apply: Linux (1x), Windows (2x), macOS (10x). Anyone with write access to a repo uses the repo owner’s allowance.
- Storage: Based on GB-hours of artifact storage (e.g., uploads/downloads). Logs and summaries don’t count.
Overage Billing
If you exceed quotas:
- Minutes: Charged per extra minute (USD rates for standard Linux runners: $0.008/min; higher for Windows/macOS due to multipliers).
- Storage: Charged as GB-months (total GB-hours / 744 hours per month, rounded up).
- Example: On a Team plan, 5,000 extra minutes (3,000 Linux + 2,000 Windows) costs ~$56.
Without a payment method, usage stops at the quota. The error you saw (“recent account payments have failed or your spending limit needs to be increased”) means either payments bounced or your spending limit (budget) is capping overages.
Spending Limits (Budgets)
- These are optional thresholds to control total monthly spend on Actions (and other metered features).
- If set too low, it blocks jobs before hitting quotas.
- How to check/increase:
- Go to GitHub Settings > Billing & plans.
- Under “Budgets and alerts,” view or edit your budget for GitHub Actions.
- Increase the limit, add a payment method, or remove the budget entirely (unlimited overages, but monitor via alerts).
- Migrated accounts may have auto-generated budgets from old limits—update them to fit your usage.
For full details, check your account’s billing dashboard for real-time usage.
GitHub Actions Billing Documentation