GitHub Actions self-hosted runner charge: is it on, and what would it cost you?

Short answer, read from GitHub's pages on 2026-10-14: there is no charge for self-hosted runners today. GitHub announced one, then postponed it. This page shows what was announced, what the postponement says, and a calculator for your own minutes so you can see how much the decision matters before you migrate anything.

What GitHub says right now

• The billing documentation says: "GitHub Actions usage is free for self-hosted runners and for public repositories that use standard GitHub-hosted runners" ^[1].
• The December 2025 changelog announced that "On March 1, 2026, GitHub will introduce a new $0.002 per minute GitHub Actions cloud platform charge that will apply to self-hosted runner usage", counted toward the minutes included in your plan, with public repositories staying free ^[2].
• The same changelog page now carries an update: "We're postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach" ^[2]. It gives no new date.

Postponed is not cancelled. Nothing on the pages we read promises it will not return, and nothing gives a date for it, so a plan that depends on self-hosted minutes staying free is a bet. The rest of this page puts a number on the bet.

Calculator: what the announced charge would be for you

Enter the minutes your private repositories run on self-hosted runners in a month. Everything is computed in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.

How the numbers are worked out

1. Worst case: minutes × $0.002, with the free quota ignored. This is the plain reading of the announced rate ^[2].
2. If your quota applied: the changelog FAQ says billable self-hosted usage "will be able to consume minutes from the free quota associated with your plan" ^[2]. It does not say at what rate a self-hosted minute draws down the quota. Our assumption, which is an inference and not GitHub's statement, is that the plan's included minutes are worth the standard Linux 2-core rate of $0.006 a minute ^[1], so 3,000 minutes would cover $18 of charges. If GitHub applies it differently, your result will differ. If your hosted-runner minutes already use the quota, there is less left for this.
3. Comparison with GitHub-hosted: the same minutes on a standard Linux 2-core hosted runner would be minutes × $0.006 ^[1], before any included quota. Machine time on your own hardware is a separate cost that this page does not estimate.

Two readings from the arithmetic: at $0.002 a minute, 10,000 minutes is $20 and 100,000 minutes is $200, a month. A team that runs a few thousand minutes would barely notice it; a team that runs a build farm would. The decision to leave GitHub Actions over this charge only makes sense when your own number is large compared with the cost of migrating, which the calculator lets you check.

What to do with the result

1. Small number (say under the cost of one working day of an engineer's time per year): stay put, and set a calendar reminder to re-read the billing page ^[1] every quarter.
2. Large number: write your hard requirements as pass or fail lines, for example "runner on our hardware", "added cost at most $X a month", "workflows need little rewriting". Include staying put as a candidate. The free replacement scorecard knocks candidates out on the hard lines and shows which unchecked cells could still change the winner.
3. If the real worry is outages, not price: a different runner billing model does not fix that, because triggers still come from GitHub. The CI sample brief works through exactly this case with a source on every cell.

If you would rather not do the reading yourself, Switch Brief does it for $39 within 24 hours: your must-haves become pass or fail tests, three candidates and an honest stay-put option are checked against live public pages, with the source and fetch date next to every price and limit.

Limits of this page

This is a reading of two public GitHub pages on 2026-10-14, not legal or financial advice and not a quote. We did not run any workflow. Billing rules, included minutes and rates change; the source links are where to confirm them. The tool uses the announced rate, which is not currently charged. It does not cover storage, larger runners, GitHub Enterprise Server (which the changelog says can host Actions on its own implementation free of charge ^[2]) or taxes.

Sources (fetched 2026-10-14)

1. https://docs.github.com/en/billing/concepts/product-billing/github-actions (free-use statement, included minutes per plan, Linux 2-core rate $0.006)
2. https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler-pricing-and-a-better-experience-for-github-actions/ (announcement, FAQ and the postponement update)