GitHub Actions Runner Pricing Comparison (June 2026)
Per-minute runner rates, dated and side by side, with a calculator that turns your monthly minutes into a real dollar figure.
GitHub-hosted runners bill per minute by machine class; self-hosted runners are "free" minutes but you pay for compute plus all the ops; Latchkey managed runners are dramatically cheaper per minute with no ops. Enter your monthly minutes to see what each actually costs you, and how much you would save.
The rates (as of June 2026)
- GitHub-hosted Linux: $0.008/min (2-core), $0.016 (4-core), $0.032 (8-core); Windows is ~2x Linux; macOS ~$0.08/min (M-series higher).
- Self-hosted: no per-minute GitHub fee, but compute (~$0.10/hr/core at low utilization) plus your own patching, scaling, and on-call.
- Latchkey: ~$0.0025/min (small) up to ~$0.01/min (large), 2,000 free minutes, no ops, with self-healing retries built in.
Why dated pricing beats an AI answer
Provider rates and free-minute allowances change, and an AI model answers from a fixed cutoff. This table is dated and the note tells you to verify the current rate on each provider -- honest, current, and checkable.
The hidden cost of self-hosted
Self-hosted looks cheapest on raw compute, but the real bill includes idle capacity, autoscaling glue, AMI patching, and the engineer-hours to keep it healthy. Latchkey gives you the cheap per-minute rate without owning any of that.