Is 2,000 free GitHub Actions minutes a month enough?
GitHub Free, for personal accounts and for organizations, includes 2,000 minutes a month for standard runners in private repositories. Whether that is enough depends on three numbers: how many jobs run per day, how long each one is billed for, and on how many days. This page works six workloads through this site's calculator and shows where the allowance runs out.
The formula in words
Multiply jobs per day by the billed minutes per job and by the working days in the month. If the result is 2,000 or less, the month costs $0.00. If it is more, subtract 2,000 and multiply the rest by the per-minute rate of the runner. Each job is rounded up to a whole minute first, so a job of 4 minutes and 10 seconds counts as 5.
Spread evenly over 22 working days, 2,000 minutes is 90 whole minutes of runner time a day. That is the budget to keep in mind: 18 jobs of 5 minutes, or 9 jobs of 10 minutes.
Six workloads against the 2,000 minutes
| Workload | Minutes per month | Included minutes left | Minutes billed | Linux 2-core x64, per month | macOS, per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 jobs a day, 5 minutes each | 550 | 1,450 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 10 jobs a day, 5 minutes each | 1,100 | 900 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 10 jobs a day, 10 minutes each | 2,200 | 0 | 200 | $1.20 | $12.40 |
| 20 jobs a day, 6 minutes each | 2,640 | 0 | 640 | $3.84 | $39.68 |
| 20 jobs a day, 10 minutes each | 4,400 | 0 | 2,400 | $14.40 | $148.80 |
| 40 jobs a day, 10 minutes each | 8,800 | 0 | 6,800 | $40.80 | $421.60 |
A solo developer or a small project that runs a handful of short jobs a day stays well inside the allowance: 10 jobs of 5 minutes use 1,100 minutes and leave 900. The allowance runs out once the daily runner time passes about 90 minutes. Ten jobs of 10 minutes a day go 200 minutes over, which is $1.20 on Linux 2-core x64 and $12.40 on macOS.
Going over on Linux is cheap in absolute terms. Twenty 10-minute jobs a day, more than double the allowance, cost $14.40 a month. The same overage on macOS costs $148.80, because each macOS minute is priced at $0.062 against $0.006 for Linux 2-core x64.
What the 2,000 minutes are worth
The GitHub pages read on the checked date list no minute multiplier, so the 2,000 minutes are counted as plain minutes whichever standard runner uses them. Their value depends on the runner they are spent on: this is what the same 2,000 minutes would cost at each runner's rate.
| Runner | Rate per minute | 2,000 minutes at the rate |
|---|---|---|
| Linux 1-core, x64 | $0.002 | $4.00 |
| Linux 2-core, x64 | $0.006 | $12.00 |
| Linux 2-core, arm64 | $0.005 | $10.00 |
| Windows 2-core, x64 | $0.01 | $20.00 |
| Windows 2-core, arm64 | $0.01 | $20.00 |
| macOS 3-core or 4-core, M1 or Intel | $0.062 | $124.00 |
On Linux 2-core x64 the allowance stands for $12.00 of compute a month; on macOS, for $124.00. If the account runs both, the order in which jobs run decides which ones use the included minutes.
When the answer is always yes
GitHub Actions usage is free for public repositories that use standard GitHub-hosted runners, and for self-hosted runners. The 40-jobs-a-day workload above costs $0.00 in a public repository and does not touch the 2,000 minutes. The allowance only matters for private repositories on GitHub-hosted runners.
With 3,000 minutes instead
GitHub Pro and GitHub Team include 3,000 minutes. The workload of 20 jobs of 6 minutes, 2,640 minutes, then fits and costs $0.00. Twenty jobs of 10 minutes go 1,400 minutes over instead of 2,400 and cost $8.40 on Linux 2-core x64, $6.00 less than on GitHub Free. That is the whole compute effect of the extra 1,000 minutes on Linux; the price of the plans themselves is not part of this data.
Staying under the allowance
If a workload sits just above 2,000 minutes, the cheapest minutes are the ones that never run: skip jobs when only documentation changes, cancel runs that a newer push has replaced, and merge very short jobs so that they are not each rounded up to a full minute. The figures on this page are compute only; storage and taxes are left out.
Check your own workload. Choose GitHub Free in the calculator, enter your jobs per day, the average job length and the working days, and read the included minutes used and the minutes billed.