Quick Answer
The GitHub Copilot cost runs from $0 for the Free tier to $10/month for Pro, $39/month for Pro+, and $100/month for Max. Teams pay $19/user/month for Business and $39/user/month for Enterprise. The twist: on June 1, 2026 GitHub swapped fixed premium requests for usage-based AI Credits, so what those flat fees actually buy now depends on how hard you push the AI. The sticker price is the easy part. The part that ambushes finance is everything stacked on top of it.
Here is every GitHub Copilot plan, current as of 2026. The GitHub Copilot pricing picture, or the full set of GitHub Copilot pricing plans, has five rungs on the individual side (the GitHub Copilot pricing individual tiers: Free, Pro, Pro+, and Max) and two for organizations.
| Plan | Price | Built for | What the price includes |
| Free | $0 | Trying it, hobby and light use | Limited monthly usage, a small AI Credit allowance, code completions |
| Pro | $10/month ($100/year) | Individual professional developers | Unlimited code completions plus a monthly AI Credit allowance |
| Pro+ | $39/month | Heavy individual and agent power users | Unlimited code completions plus a monthly AI Credit allowance |
| Max | $100/month | Sustained, all-day agent users | GitHub’s highest individual credit allowance |
| Business | $19/user/month | Teams that need controls and IP indemnity | $19/user/month in monthly AI Credits |
| Enterprise | $39/user/month | Large orgs wanting custom models and deep GitHub integration | $39/user/month in AI Credits (requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud) |
The base prices for Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise did not change in the June 2026 transition. What changed is the engine underneath them.
One number worth fixing in the budget: code completions and next edit suggestions are free on every paid plan and never touch your credits, per GitHub’s announcement. The meter only runs on the fancy stuff.
What changed with GitHub Copilot billing on June 1, 2026?
On June 1, 2026, every Copilot plan moved to usage-based billing. This is the biggest GitHub Copilot pricing update of 2026. GitHub retired premium requests and replaced them with GitHub AI Credits, billed by token consumption (input, output, and cached tokens) at each model’s listed API rate.
In plain English: your monthly fee now comes with a bucket of credits instead of a fixed number of requests. Use modest features and you never see the bottom of the bucket. Run agents all day on premium models and you will meet the bottom, then the overage rates, then a calendar invite from finance.
The flat fee still covers code completions and chat against the included models. Credits get spent on the heavier work: agent sessions, premium model calls, code review, and Copilot CLI. Light users will not notice. Agent-heavy developers absolutely will.
There is also a migration wrinkle GitHub spelled out: monthly Pro and Pro+ subscribers auto-moved to credits on June 1, while annual subscribers ride out their existing premium-request terms until renewal. So two developers on the same plan can be on two different billing systems this year. Fun for nobody in accounts payable.
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What were GitHub Copilot premium requests and what replaced them?
If you searched GitHub Copilot premium requests and landed on a guide counting a fixed monthly allowance, that guide is describing a system GitHub is sunsetting. Premium requests were Copilot’s old currency: every paid plan included a set number, and you spent them on advanced models and agent features while ordinary autocomplete stayed free.
As of June 1, 2026, premium requests gave way to AI Credits for monthly plans.
Instead of counting requests, Copilot now counts tokens and bills against your credit allowance. Same idea, finer-grained meter.
Why does this matter for budgeting? Because premium models burn credits at very different rates. A heavyweight reasoning model can drain your allowance several times faster than a standard model for the same task. The lesson teams keep relearning: the model you pick is a line item, not just a preference. For the deeper mechanics of token-based AI cost, CloudZero breaks it down in its guide to inference cost.
What does GitHub Copilot actually cost per user?
Sticker prices describe a quiet month. Real bills describe a shipping month. Here is how the GitHub Copilot cost per user actually shakes out by usage profile.
- The light user. Mostly tab-completion, a few chat questions a day, the occasional pull request review. Completions are free, so this developer rarely touches their credit allowance. On Pro at $10/month, they comfortably stay inside the flat fee. This is most developers most of the time.
- The agent-heavy user. Two or three agent sessions a day, leaning on premium models to build and refactor. This developer can chew through a Pro allowance before mid-month, then either slows down or pays per token. For them, Pro+ at $39/month or Max at $100/month is usually cheaper than Pro plus overages.
- The team. Multiply per seat. A 30-developer team on Business at $19/user/month is $570/month in base seats, before anyone runs a single agent past their included credits. The base cost is predictable. The credit consumption on top is the variable nobody forecasts on day one.
That gap between the seat price and the all-in bill is the entire reason “what teams actually pay” is a different number from “what GitHub charges per seat.” The first is on the pricing page. The second shows up in your cloud and AI spend.
What are the hidden costs of GitHub Copilot?
Here is where the GitHub Copilot price quietly grows. None of these are scams. They are just the line items that live one click past the headline number.
- The Enterprise Cloud requirement. Copilot Enterprise at $39/user/month requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud, which is billed separately per user. So the real Enterprise cost is the Copilot seat plus the platform underneath it. Budget for both, not just the line that says “Copilot.”
- Code review now burns Actions minutes. Beginning June 1, 2026, Copilot code review consumes GitHub Actions minutes in addition to AI Credits, billed at standard Actions per-minute rates, per GitHub’s announcement. If your team leans on automated review, that is a second meter running.
- Premium model burn. Switching to a top-tier reasoning model for routine work empties your credit allowance fast without a proportional return. Default to standard models and reserve the premium ones for problems that earn them.
- Overage with no safety net. Under the old system, exhausting your allowance could quietly fall back to a cheaper model. GitHub removed that fallback in the new model, so usage is governed by available credits and admin budget controls instead. Translation: set budgets, or the budget sets itself.
Is GitHub Copilot free? Sort of
Yes, there is a useful GitHub Copilot free tier at $0, aimed at individual developers without organization access. It includes a limited monthly slice of features plus code completions, which is plenty to kick the tires before anyone signs a purchase order.
So, is Copilot free? Partly. The Free tier costs nothing, but it caps your monthly usage, and the moment you need heavy agent work or premium models you are into a paid plan or usage credits.
Verified students get more than the standard free tier through the GitHub Student Developer Pack, also at no cost. Great for learning, less great as a long-term team strategy unless your whole team is somehow still in school.
The honest read: Free is a fantastic trial and a fine tool for hobby projects. For a team shipping production code with agents and chat all day, you will outgrow it in roughly the time it takes to say “why did the agent loop all weekend.”
Which GitHub Copilot plan should you choose?
Choosing a GitHub Copilot subscription is less about feature checkboxes and more about how hard your team actually pushes the AI. Pick by profile, not by fear of missing a feature.
- Hobby or under ten hours a week: Free. It costs nothing and covers casual coding.
- Most individual developers: Pro at $10/month. The GitHub Copilot Pro pricing tier gives you unlimited completions, a sensible credit allowance, and the lowest-drama bill in the lineup.
- All-day agent power users: the GitHub Copilot Pro+ pricing tier at $39/month, or GitHub Copilot Max at $100/month if you are running Copilot as an automated agent for hours daily. If your overages on Pro are creeping toward the Pro+ price, just upgrade and stop watching the meter.
- Teams under ~50 developers: Business at $19/user/month. This is the GitHub Copilot business pricing tier most companies want, because it adds centralized license management, policy controls, and a contractual guarantee that your code is not used to train models.
- Large organization with proprietary codebases: Enterprise at $39/user/month. The GitHub Copilot enterprise pricing tier adds deep GitHub integration, knowledge-base access, and custom model tuning, on top of the Enterprise Cloud platform it requires. Worth it when your codebase is big and weird enough that generic suggestions miss.
For the licensing and seat-math side of a rollout, the GitHub Copilot license cost scales linearly per seat, so the real planning work is forecasting the credit consumption on top, not the seats themselves.
How does GitHub Copilot cost compare to Cursor?
The fastest way to sanity-check a price is to check what the neighbors charge. Among serious AI coding tools, GitHub Copilot is the budget pick, and the gap is widest on teams.
| Tool | Free tier | Individual | Team (per user) |
| GitHub Copilot | $0 | $10/month (Pro) | $19/user/month (Business) |
| Cursor | $0 (Hobby) | $20/month (Pro) | $40/user/month (Business) |
For individuals, Copilot Pro is $10/month versus Cursor Pro at $20/month. Same general job, half the sticker.
For teams the spread is larger: Copilot Business at $19/user/month is less than half the price of Cursor Business at $40/user/month. Run that on a 25-developer team and it is $5,700 a year for Copilot Business versus $12,000 for Cursor Teams, a $6,300 annual difference before either side touches a usage credit.
The catch, and you could see this one coming: both tools moved to usage-based credit billing (Copilot in June 2026, Cursor back in June 2025), so the sticker gap is only half the story.
Cursor’s higher price buys more mature agent and multi-file editing. Copilot’s lower price buys native GitHub integration. Whichever you pick, the variable cost stacked on top of the seat is the number that moves your bill, which is the whole reason “what teams actually pay” beats “what the pricing page says.” For the wider scope of AI tool pricing, CloudZero’s guide to AI pricing is a useful map, and its rundown of what AI costs across the stack adds the bigger budget picture.
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How do you manage GitHub Copilot costs?
The move to usage-based billing did teams a backhanded favor: it made AI spend visible enough that ignoring it is now a choice. A few habits keep the GitHub Copilot pricing model working for you instead of against you.
- Set budgets and alerts. GitHub gives admins budget controls and a billing dashboard for premium usage. Turn them on before the first big month, not after. The worst version of usage-based billing is the one where the bill arrives before the awareness does.
- Pull your usage history. GitHub keeps premium-request and credit usage in the billing dashboard. Your past consumption is the best baseline for forecasting the new credit model, so export it before it ages out.
- Route by model. Reserve premium models for the work that needs them and default everything else to standard models. Most of your credit savings live in this one habit.
- Track Copilot as part of total AI spend, not a silo. Copilot is one line in a fast-growing AI bill that also includes model APIs, GPU compute, and other tools, the kind of sprawl that quietly erodes margins. Teams that see all of it together make better calls than teams squinting at one invoice at a time. CloudZero research found average monthly AI spend is climbing fast across organizations.
As Erik Peterson, CloudZero’s co-founder and CTO, puts it, AI spend today is “lots of bets, not a lot of clarity.” That unified view across cloud and AI spend is what CloudZero is built for, as the AI ROI company, connecting every dollar to the team, product, and feature behind it.
Want to see where your AI and Copilot spend really goes? Book a CloudZero demo, take the self-guided product tour, or start with a free cloud cost assessment before your next bill lands.
Frequently Asked Questions about Github Copilot costs
