How to Account for Minutes Multipliers by OS

On GitHub-hosted standard runners, Linux counts as 1x, Windows as 2x, and macOS as 10x, so one macOS minute equals ten Linux minutes.

Plan your matrix and job placement around these multipliers: move everything that can run on Linux to Linux, and keep macOS jobs short and rare.

Multipliers

Keep expensive OSes minimal

jobs:
  # Cheap Linux job does the bulk of testing
  test-linux:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: npm ci && npm test
  # macOS only runs the platform-specific smoke test
  test-macos:
    runs-on: macos-latest
    steps:
      - run: npm ci && npm run test:macos-smoke

Gotchas

• Multipliers apply to billed minutes, so a 3-minute macOS job draws 30 minutes from your allowance.
• Public repos on standard runners are free regardless of OS; the multiplier hits private repos.
• Larger runners have their own per-minute rates on top of, not instead of, these tiers.

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