GitHub Actions Price Change

GitHub Actions reduces pricing by 15-39% for GitHub hosted runners (from 2026-01-01) and adds a new $0.002/minute cost for self-hosted runners (from 2026-03-01).

GitHub recently wrote that developers used 11.5 billion GitHub actions minutes in 2025. One can safely assume that a majority of this comes from enterprises, who in turn use self-hosted runners. In the earlier model with free self-hosted runner usage, GitHub had no way to monetize most of the actions usage.

This new GitHub actions self-hosted runner tax is a simple way for GitHub to monetize their actions platform and push users to use their own runners.

Note: BitBucket recently announced that they will be charging for self-hosted runners as well.

This is a significant change and we break down what it means.

GitHub's new tax on self-hosted runners

GitHub adds a new $0.002/minute cost for self-hosted runners. This is a new cost charged by GitHub for all users except for GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) customers.

Reduced pricing for GitHub hosted runners

GitHub has reduced pricing for GitHub hosted runners. The computation is as follows:

Smaller runners see a lesser reduction in price, whereas the larger runners see a greater reduction. It's fantastic to see that GitHub is reducing pricing for GitHub hosted runners. However, the magnitude of the reduction is not as significant as one might expect.

Pricing table

Optimizing for cost

Here are the practical implications and considerations to optimize for cost, given the new pricing. These are generic and ensure you think through your workflows and runners before making any changes.

1. Self-hosting runners or using WarpBuild runners is still cheaper

Despite the $0.002/minute self-hosted runner tax, self-hosting runners on your cloud (aws/gcp/azure/...) or using WarpBuild runners remains the cheaper option.

2. Prefer larger runners

If your workflow scales with the number of vCPUs, prefer larger runners. That ensures you spend fewer minutes on the runner, which reduces the GitHub self-hosted runner tax.

For example, using actions-runner-controller with heavy jobs running on 1 vcpu runners is not a good idea. Instead, prefer a 2vcpu runner (say) if it runs the job ~2x faster.

3. Prefer faster runners

All else being equal, prefer faster runners. That ensures you spend fewer minutes on the runner, which reduces the GitHub self-hosted runner tax.

For example, if you're self-hosting on aws and using a t3g.medium runner, it's better to use a t4g.medium runner since the newer generation is faster, but not much more expensive.

4. Prefer fewer shards

If you have a lot of shards for your jobs (example: tests on ~50 shards), consider reducing the number of shards and parallelizing the tests on fewer but larger runners.

5. Improve job performance

This is not new advice, but it's now more important than ever because of the additional GitHub self-hosted runner tax.

6. Use GitHub hosted runners for very short jobs

For linters and other very short jobs, it's better to use GitHub hosted runners.

What's not changing?

1. Public repos generally stand to gain from this change.
   • Standard runner size (ubuntu-latest) is still free.
   • No $0.002/minute tax for self-hosted runners.
2. GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) users do not have the $0.002/minute tax.

Calculate Your Cost Impact

Use the calculator below to analyze your GitHub Actions usage and see how the new pricing affects your costs. Upload your usage CSV from GitHub and compare different runner scenarios.

🚀 Try WarpBuild

Using WarpBuild runners is cheaper than using GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/minute self-hosted runner tax.

WarpBuild Cloud Runners are baremetal servers with high single core performance and directly attached NVMe disks for fast disk IO. This paired with caching and snapshotting capabilities, WarpBuild runners are a great way to optimize your workflows and save money.