What 5,000 GitHub Actions minutes cost in a month
Five thousand minutes is the volume where a small project first sees a GitHub Actions line on its invoice: more than any of the small plans include, but not by much. What the extra minutes cost depends on the plan and, far more, on the runner. The tables below work it out with this site's calculator.
Assumptions
- A private repository. In a public repository standard runners are free, so 5,000 minutes cost $0.00.
- 25 jobs per working day, 10 minutes each, 20 working days a month: 500 jobs and 5,000 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.
5,000 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 3,000 are billed. GitHub Pro and GitHub Team include 3,000, so 2,000 are billed. GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes 50,000, so nothing is billed and 45,000 included minutes are left over.
| Runner | Rate per minute | All 5,000 minutes at the rate | Free plans (3,000 billed) | Pro or Team (2,000 billed) | Enterprise Cloud (none billed) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 1-core, x64 | $0.002 | $10.00 | $6.00 | $4.00 | $0.00 |
| Linux 2-core, x64 | $0.006 | $30.00 | $18.00 | $12.00 | $0.00 |
| Linux 2-core, arm64 | $0.005 | $25.00 | $15.00 | $10.00 | $0.00 |
| Windows 2-core, x64 or arm64 | $0.01 | $50.00 | $30.00 | $20.00 | $0.00 |
| macOS 3-core or 4-core | $0.062 | $310.00 | $186.00 | $124.00 | $0.00 |
On GitHub Team the allowance covers three fifths of this workload, which is why the Team column is so far below the third column. The third column is what the minutes would cost with no allowance at all, and it is the figure to use for minutes you add on top of a workload that already exhausts the plan: five thousand more Linux 2-core minutes add $30.00 to the bill, not $12.00.
Over a year, the GitHub Team figures are $144.00 on Linux 2-core x64 and $1,488.00 on macOS. The workload is identical; only the runner differs.
5,000 minutes spread over three runners
Few projects run on one operating system. Take the same 500 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 | 4,000 | 2,400 | 1,600 | $9.60 |
| Windows 2-core | 750 | 450 | 300 | $3.00 |
| macOS | 250 | 150 | 100 | $6.20 |
| Total | 5,000 | 3,000 | 2,000 | $18.80 |
That is $18.80 a month, or $225.60 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: $12.00 if the macOS and Windows jobs happened to use the allowance first, and $29.00 if the Linux jobs did. At this volume the allowance is most of the workload, so the spread between the bounds is wide compared with the bill itself.
What the numbers say
- At 5,000 minutes the plan still matters. Moving from a free plan to GitHub Pro or GitHub Team takes 1,000 more minutes off the bill, worth $6.00 a month on Linux 2-core. That is a third of the free-plan figure here; at larger volumes the same 1,000 minutes are a rounding error.
- The runner matters more. The same billed minutes cost $12.00 on Linux 2-core x64 and $124.00 on macOS on GitHub Team. A project that can keep macOS for release builds only stays close to the Linux figure.
- arm64 is the cheap lever on Linux. On GitHub Team the Linux arm64 runner costs $10.00 against $12.00 for x64, if your jobs take the same time on it.
- Job length is part of the count. The 5,000 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 5,000 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.