What 50,000 GitHub Actions minutes cost in a month
Fifty thousand minutes is a busy engineering organization: about 830 hours of runner time every month. It is also exactly the monthly allowance of GitHub Enterprise Cloud, which makes it a useful number to price. The figures below come from this site's calculator.
Assumptions
- Private repositories. Standard runners are free in public repositories, where the same usage costs $0.00.
- 250 jobs per working day, 10 minutes each, 20 working days a month: 5,000 jobs and 50,000 minutes. The jobs are whole minutes long, so per-job rounding adds nothing.
- Standard GitHub-hosted runners only, with no minute multiplier: none is listed on the GitHub pages read on the checked date.
- Compute only. Seats, storage, larger runners and taxes are outside these figures.
50,000 minutes on a single runner
On the free plans, 2,000 minutes are included and 48,000 are billed. On GitHub Pro and GitHub Team, 3,000 are included and 47,000 are billed. At this volume the allowance of the smaller plans barely shows: it covers about one working day of the month.
| Runner | Rate per minute | All 50,000 minutes at the rate | Free plans (48,000 billed) | Pro or Team (47,000 billed) | Enterprise Cloud (none billed) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 1-core, x64 | $0.002 | $100.00 | $96.00 | $94.00 | $0.00 |
| Linux 2-core, x64 | $0.006 | $300.00 | $288.00 | $282.00 | $0.00 |
| Linux 2-core, arm64 | $0.005 | $250.00 | $240.00 | $235.00 | $0.00 |
| Windows 2-core, x64 or arm64 | $0.01 | $500.00 | $480.00 | $470.00 | $0.00 |
| macOS 3-core or 4-core | $0.062 | $3,100.00 | $2,976.00 | $2,914.00 | $0.00 |
On GitHub Team with Linux 2-core x64 runners that is $282.00 a month, or $3,384.00 a year.
The Enterprise Cloud line
GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes 50,000 minutes a month, so this workload sits exactly on the allowance and the overage is $0.00 on every standard runner. That is the value of the allowance for compute, and it depends on the runner: the same 47,000 minutes that GitHub Team bills are worth $282.00 on Linux 2-core and $2,914.00 on macOS. The plan's seat price is not in this site's data, so this page does not say whether the plan pays for itself.
The allowance is a cliff edge, not a discount. Push the same account to 300 jobs a day, which is 60,000 minutes, and the 10,000 minutes beyond the allowance are billed at the full rate: $60.00 a month on Linux 2-core x64, or $720.00 a year.
50,000 minutes spread over three runners
Take the 5,000 jobs on GitHub Team with 80% on Linux 2-core x64, 15% on Windows and 5% on macOS, and the 3,000 included minutes shared in proportion to each runner's minutes.
| Runner | Minutes | Included minutes used | Minutes billed | Cost per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 2-core, x64 | 40,000 | 2,400 | 37,600 | $225.60 |
| Windows 2-core | 7,500 | 450 | 7,050 | $70.50 |
| macOS | 2,500 | 150 | 2,350 | $145.70 |
| Total | 50,000 | 3,000 | 47,000 | $441.80 |
The mix costs $441.80 a month, or $5,301.60 a year. The macOS jobs are 5% of the minutes and a third of the bill. Depending on which jobs happen to use the included minutes first, the month lands between $310.00 and $452.00.
Where to look for savings at this size
- The macOS share. In the mix above, 2,350 billed macOS minutes cost more than twice the 7,050 billed Windows minutes. Running on macOS only what must run there is the largest single lever.
- arm64 for Linux jobs. All on Linux, GitHub Team bills $235.00 on arm64 against $282.00 on x64, provided the jobs take no longer.
- Shorter and fewer jobs. Every minute beyond the allowance is paid in full, so caching and cancelling superseded runs cut the bill directly at this volume.
- Self-hosted runners. GitHub does not bill minutes on them. Whether your own machines are cheaper depends on what they and their upkeep cost you.
Price your own volume. The free calculator takes your plan, jobs per day, job length and runner mix and shows the overage per month and per year, with a per-runner breakdown.