Usage limits, billing, and administration

About billing for GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions help you automate your software development workflows in the same place you store code and collaborate on pull requests and issues. You can write individual tasks, called actions, and combine them to create a custom workflow. For more information, see "Understanding GitHub Actions."

GitHub Actions usage is free for both public repositories and self-hosted runners. For private repositories, each GitHub account receives a certain amount of free minutes and storage, depending on the product used with the account. Any usage beyond the included amounts is controlled by spending limits. For more information, see "About billing for GitHub Actions."

Availability

GitHub Actions is available on all GitHub products, but GitHub Actions is not available for private repositories owned by accounts using legacy per-repository plans. For more information, see "GitHub's products."

Usage limits

There are some limits on GitHub Actions usage when using GitHub-hosted runners. These limits are subject to change.

• Job execution time - Each job in a workflow can run for up to 6 hours of execution time. If a job reaches this limit, the job is terminated and fails to complete.

• Workflow run time - Each workflow run is limited to 35 days. If a workflow run reaches this limit, the workflow run is cancelled. This period includes execution duration, and time spent on waiting and approval.

• API requests - You can execute up to 1000 API requests in an hour across all actions within a repository. If exceeded, additional API calls will fail, which might cause jobs to fail.

• Concurrent jobs - The number of concurrent jobs you can run in your account depends on your GitHub plan, as indicated in the following table. If exceeded, any additional jobs are queued.

  GitHub plan	Total concurrent jobs	Maximum concurrent macOS jobs
  Free	20	5
  Pro	40	5
  Team	60	5
  Enterprise	180	50

• Job matrix - A job matrix can generate a maximum of 256 jobs per workflow run. This limit applies to both GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners.

• Workflow run queue - No more than 500 workflow runs can be queued in a 10 second interval per repository. If a workflow run reaches this limit, the workflow run is terminated and fails to complete.

Usage policy

In addition to the usage limits, you must ensure that you use GitHub Actions within the GitHub Terms of Service. For more information on GitHub Actions-specific terms, see the GitHub Additional Product Terms.

Billing for reusable workflows

If you reuse a workflow, billing is always associated with the caller workflow. Assignment of GitHub-hosted runners is always evaluated using only the caller's context. The caller cannot use GitHub-hosted runners from the called repository.

For more information see, "Reusing workflows."

Artifact and log retention policy

You can configure the artifact and log retention period for your repository, organization, or enterprise account.

By default, the artifacts and log files generated by workflows are retained for 90 days before they are automatically deleted. You can adjust the retention period, depending on the type of repository:

• For public repositories: you can change this retention period to anywhere between 1 day or 90 days.

• For private repositories: you can change this retention period to anywhere between 1 day or 400 days.

When you customize the retention period, it only applies to new artifacts and log files, and does not retroactively apply to existing objects. For managed repositories and organizations, the maximum retention period cannot exceed the limit set by the managing organization or enterprise.

For more information, see:

• "Managing GitHub Actions settings for a repository"
• "Configuring the retention period for GitHub Actions for artifacts and logs in your organization"
• "Enforcing policies for GitHub Actions in your enterprise"

Disabling or limiting GitHub Actions for your repository or organization

By default, GitHub Actions is enabled on all repositories and organizations. You can choose to disable GitHub Actions or limit it to actions and reusable workflows in your organization.

For more information, see:

• "Managing GitHub Actions settings for a repository"
• "Disabling or limiting GitHub Actions for your organization"
• "Enforcing policies for GitHub Actions in your enterprise"

Disabling and enabling workflows

You can enable and disable individual workflows in your repository on GitHub.

To prevent unnecessary workflow runs, scheduled workflows may be disabled automatically. When a public repository is forked, scheduled workflows are disabled by default. In a public repository, scheduled workflows are automatically disabled when no repository activity has occurred in 60 days.

For more information, see "Disabling and enabling a workflow."