GitHub Actions cost calculator

By Kaveh Alemi·Latchkey

This GitHub Actions cost calculator turns a month of minutes into the bill GitHub sends: $0.006 a minute for a standard 2-core Linux runner, $0.010 for Windows and $0.062 for macOS, read from GitHub's runner pricing reference on 20 September 2026. Enter your Linux, Windows and macOS minutes, pick a runner size and say whether the repository is private or public, and the page works out the GitHub bill, the same month with the Linux minutes on Latchkey at $0.0025 a minute, and the gap between them.

Two numbers decide what you pay: how many minutes you run, and which machine runs them. The second one moves the bill much further than most teams expect, because a macOS minute lists at more than ten times a Linux minute and a 16-core runner lists at seven times a standard one.

The calculator below is arithmetic on published rates, nothing else. It runs in the page, sends nothing anywhere, and shows its working so you can check any line against the rate tables on this page. The calculator itself is below the rate tables it uses, so skip ahead if you already know your minutes.

What actually decides the bill

GitHub bills Actions on the time your jobs spend on a GitHub-hosted runner, at a rate set by the operating system and the size of the machine. Every job is rounded up to the whole minute, so a repository that runs many short jobs pays for more minutes than it uses.

Private repositories get an allowance of included minutes each month, which resets at the start of the billing cycle. Standard runners on public repositories are free, and so are standard runners used by GitHub Pages and Dependabot. Larger runners are the exception on both counts: they are always charged, on public repositories as well as private ones, and included minutes cannot be spent on them.

Self-hosted runners cost nothing to attach. GitHub's billing documentation still states that Actions usage is free for self-hosted runners, which is the quiet reason a self-hosted fleet looks free until you count what the machines cost.

• Minutes, rounded up per job, at the rate for the runner you chose.
• The operating system: Linux is the floor, Windows is a little under twice it, macOS is more than ten times it.
• The machine size: a larger runner is billed from the first minute with no allowance.
• Repository visibility: standard runners are free on public repositories, larger runners never are.
• Storage, billed separately from minutes: artifacts and packages at $0.25 per GB-month, Actions cache at $0.07 per GB-month above the included 10 GB per repository.

The rates the calculator uses

These are the standard GitHub-hosted runner rates. They are the rates that took effect on 1 January 2026, when GitHub cut hosted runner prices by up to 39 percent, and they already include the $0.002 per minute Actions cloud platform charge that GitHub describes in the same announcement.

The Latchkey column is the published rate for the runner of the same size. Latchkey publishes Linux runners only, so Windows and macOS minutes stay on GitHub-hosted runners in every calculation on this page, priced at GitHub's rate on both sides of the comparison.

Larger runners: no allowance, and the rate climbs with the cores

A larger runner is the same operating system on a bigger machine, and it is billed from the first minute whatever plan you are on. That is the line in GitHub's documentation that surprises people: included minutes cannot be used for larger runners, and larger runners are not free for public repositories either.

The arithmetic is simple and unforgiving. Doubling the cores roughly doubles the rate, so a larger runner only pays for itself when it cuts the wall clock by more than it raises the rate. A 4-core Linux runner at $0.012 is worth it if the job finishes in less than half the time; if it finishes in 60 percent of the time, you have paid 20 percent more for a faster red build.

A worked example, with every input written down

Take a month of 40,000 Linux minutes, 4,000 Windows minutes and 3,000 macOS minutes, all on standard runners, in private repositories, on a GitHub Team plan that includes 3,000 minutes.

Spend the allowance on the most expensive minutes first, which is the smallest bill the allowance can produce: 3,000 macOS minutes are covered, so the macOS line is $0. The Windows minutes cost 4,000 at $0.010, which is $40. The Linux minutes cost 40,000 at $0.006, which is $240. The month is $280.

Now move only the Linux minutes to Latchkey, at the published $0.0025 for a 2 vCPU latchkey-small runner. The Linux line becomes 40,000 at $0.0025, which is $100. Windows and macOS have not moved, so they still cost $40 and $0. The month is $140, and the gap is $140, or $1,680 over a year.

Change one input and watch the shape change. If the allowance has already gone on something else, the 3,000 macOS minutes cost 3,000 at $0.062, which is $186. The GitHub month becomes $466 and the Latchkey month becomes $326, and the saving is still $140, because the only thing that moved was the Linux line. That is the honest shape of this comparison: the runner rate is the only lever a cheaper runner pulls, and how Latchkey cuts the GitHub Actions bill is the case for pulling it.

What the calculator does not include

Storage is billed apart from minutes and the calculator does not touch it. Artifacts share an allowance with GitHub Packages and cost $0.25 per GB-month above it, the Actions cache costs $0.07 per GB-month above the 10 GB that every repository gets, and GitHub measures cache by peak usage in each hour rather than at the end of the month.

Rounding is not modeled either. GitHub rounds every job up to the whole minute, so the figure you should type in is the minute count from your own usage report, which is already rounded. A workflow of twenty 20-second jobs bills twenty minutes, not seven.

On the Latchkey side, the calculator charges every Linux minute at the published per-minute rate. It does not subtract the free runner minutes each plan includes, which are 2,000 on Developer, 4,000 on Launch and 6,000 on Scale, and it does not add the monthly plan fee, which is $5, $19 and $49 for those plans. Those two omissions push in opposite directions, and both are left out so that every number on the screen is a published rate multiplied by a minute count you supplied.

Run your own numbers

Take the minute counts from your GitHub usage report rather than from memory, because the report is already rounded the way the bill is. The rate table renders below the form, so the calculation works with JavaScript switched off: multiply the minutes by the rate for your runner and subtract what the allowance covers.

If the result is uncomfortable, the next question is which workflows produced those minutes. Reduce your GitHub Actions costs ranks the changes by what each one saves, how GitHub Actions pricing works explains the rules behind every rate, and a job that dies halfway is a full set of minutes billed for nothing, which is why exit code 137 in GitHub Actions belongs on a cost page at all.

Key takeaways

• A standard Linux minute lists at $0.006, a Windows minute at $0.010 and a macOS minute at $0.062.
• Included minutes never apply to larger runners, and larger runners are billed on public repositories too.
• Only the Linux minutes move to a cheaper runner, so that is the only line a runner change can shrink.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• GitHub Actions billing: included minutes, storage and how usage is measured (verified 2026-09-20)
• GitHub: Actions runner pricing, every per-minute rate by runner (verified 2026-09-20)
• GitHub Changelog: update to GitHub Actions pricing, 16 December 2025 (verified 2026-09-20)
• Latchkey pricing: published per-minute runner rates and plan minutes (verified 2026-09-20)
• GitHub Actions documentation