What 10,000 GitHub Actions minutes cost in a month
The answer runs from nothing to several hundred dollars, and it depends on three things: whether the repository is private, which plan you are on, and which runner the minutes are spent on. The tables below work it out for each case with this site's calculator.
Assumptions
- A private repository. In a public repository standard runners are free, so 10,000 minutes cost $0.00.
- 50 jobs per working day, 10 minutes each, 20 working days a month: 1,000 jobs and 10,000 minutes. Each job is a whole number of minutes, so GitHub's rounding up of every job adds nothing here.
- Standard GitHub-hosted runners only. Larger runners cannot use included minutes and are priced in the full version of the calculator.
- Compute only: the plan's seat price, storage and taxes are not in the figures.
10,000 minutes on a single runner
The plan's included minutes come off first. GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations include 2,000 minutes a month, so 8,000 are billed. GitHub Pro and GitHub Team include 3,000, so 7,000 are billed. GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes 50,000, so nothing is billed.
| Runner | Rate per minute | All 10,000 minutes at the rate | Free plans (8,000 billed) | Pro or Team (7,000 billed) | Enterprise Cloud (none billed) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 1-core, x64 | $0.002 | $20.00 | $16.00 | $14.00 | $0.00 |
| Linux 2-core, x64 | $0.006 | $60.00 | $48.00 | $42.00 | $0.00 |
| Linux 2-core, arm64 | $0.005 | $50.00 | $40.00 | $35.00 | $0.00 |
| Windows 2-core, x64 or arm64 | $0.01 | $100.00 | $80.00 | $70.00 | $0.00 |
| macOS 3-core or 4-core | $0.062 | $620.00 | $496.00 | $434.00 | $0.00 |
The third column is what the minutes would cost with no allowance at all. It is the figure to use for minutes you add on top of a workload that already exhausts the plan: ten thousand more Linux 2-core minutes add $60.00 to the bill, not $42.00.
Over a year, the GitHub Team figures are $504.00 on Linux 2-core x64 and $5,208.00 on macOS. The workload is identical; only the runner differs.
10,000 minutes spread over three runners
Few projects run on one operating system. Take the same 1,000 jobs on GitHub Team with 80% of them on Linux 2-core x64, 15% on Windows and 5% on macOS. The calculator shares the 3,000 included minutes between the runners in proportion to their minutes.
| Runner | Minutes | Included minutes used | Minutes billed | Cost per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 2-core, x64 | 8,000 | 2,400 | 5,600 | $33.60 |
| Windows 2-core | 1,500 | 450 | 1,050 | $10.50 |
| macOS | 500 | 150 | 350 | $21.70 |
| Total | 10,000 | 3,000 | 7,000 | $65.80 |
That is $65.80 a month, or $789.60 a year. One twentieth of the minutes, the macOS share, is a third of the bill.
Included minutes are really used up in the order jobs run, not in proportion, so the exact figure moves with the calendar. The calculator gives the bounds: $42.00 if the macOS and Windows jobs happened to use the allowance first, and $76.00 if the Linux jobs did.
What the numbers say
- The plan matters less than the runner. Moving from a free plan to GitHub Team takes 1,000 more minutes off the bill, worth $6.00 a month on Linux 2-core. Moving the same workload from Linux to macOS multiplies it by more than ten.
- arm64 is the cheap lever on Linux. On GitHub Team the Linux arm64 runner costs $35.00 against $42.00 for x64, if your jobs take the same time on it.
- Job length is part of the count. The 10,000 minutes here are billed minutes. A job that runs for 9 minutes and 10 seconds is billed as 10, so measure your usage in billed minutes, not in clock time.
Not exactly 10,000 minutes? Enter your own jobs per day, job length and runner mix in the free calculator. It shows minutes, included minutes used, overage and the cost per month and per year.