GitHub-Hosted Runner - CI/CD Glossary Definition
A GitHub-hosted runner is a clean, GitHub-managed VM provisioned for each job and destroyed afterward.
A GitHub-hosted runner is a fresh virtual machine that GitHub provisions and tears down for each job, pre-loaded with common build tools, so you pay per minute and never manage the underlying infrastructure.
GitHub-hosted runners (labels like ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, macos-latest) come with a maintained software image and are billed per minute. Each job gets a fresh VM, so there is no state carried between runs.
Billing note
Hosted-runner minutes are metered per repository visibility and machine size. Linux runners bill at the base rate, while Windows and macOS runners carry multipliers, so watch macOS usage in particular.
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