GitHub Update on GitHub Actions Price Increase for Self-hosted Runners in 2026

GitHub Actions pricing for self-hosted runners will increase from $0.00 (free) to $0.002 per minute, starting March 1, 2026.

For every 1,000 minutes of CI runtime on your own hardware, the new charge will be $2. At 10,000 minutes per month, the bill becomes $20 per month. At 50,000 minutes, it becomes $100 per month. At 80,000 minutes, the cost reaches $160 per month, covering GitHub’s Actions orchestration layer, not compute, hardware, or hosting.

A 30-minute integration test that previously cost $0 on a self-hosted runner will now cost $0.06 per run. If that job runs 50 times per day, the daily cost is $3, or approximately $90 per month.

GitHub says that 96% of customers will see no price change. Of the remaining 4% affected, some users will see lower bills due to GitHub-hosted runner price reductions of up to 39%, effective January 1, 2026, while others will see an increase of about $13 per month or more. If you run heavy or long-running CI workloads, you should expect a higher monthly increase, potentially tens or even hundreds of dollars, depending on your usage.

In the end, these changes will hit self-hosted runners the hardest, especially teams that optimized their CI pipelines around zero-cost platform usage. If you fall into this group, you should prepare for a significant cost increase in 2026 or begin evaluating alternatives.

We will continue to monitor GitHub Actions price changes and update them on GitHub Actions Pricing history page.

You can read more about the pricing changes by Github.