When do GitHub Actions minutes reset, and how do you keep CI running until then?

GitHub's included Actions usage resets at the start of each billing cycle: for metered products such as Actions, the cycle "starts at 00:00:00 UTC on the first day of each month", and the included amount "resets to the full amount", so what you didn't use doesn't roll over (GitHub Docs, read on November 9, 2026). Since GitHub rewrote its billing pages on October 28, 2026, that amount is in dollars: $12, $18 or $300 a month by plan. How many minutes are left depends on which runners your jobs use.

Skipbox publishes this guide and sells a runner. Every fact about GitHub below links to GitHub's own page, read on November 9, 2026.

The reset date and time

00:00 UTC on the 1st lands on the evening of the last day of the month in the Americas:

A reset is not a charge. GitHub bills last month's extra usage on your billing date, which "is typically the day you started a paid plan". Self-serve GitHub Enterprise Cloud accounts that pay by card moved to the 1st from December 1, 2025.

Does unused usage roll over?

No. "This value resets to the full amount at the start of each billing cycle": a month with half the included amount unused starts the next month at the full amount, not at one and a half.

Storage works differently. Artifacts and caches stay where they are; it's the accrued storage charges that "reset to zero at the start of each billing cycle".

What "minutes" means now

Until October 28, 2026, GitHub's billing page listed the included amounts as 2,000, 3,000 and 50,000 minutes (github/docs commit 8e7396e5e). It now says: "The included compute usage is expressed as a monetary amount, not a fixed number of minutes or other usage units." Each job's minutes are priced at its runner's rate and taken from that amount.

What the included amount buys, at GitHub's per-minute rates on private repositories:

Three things change the count:

• Rounding. "GitHub rounds the minutes and partial minutes each job uses up to the nearest whole minute." Ten jobs of 10 seconds use 10 minutes.
• Larger runners draw on the included amount only "when the billing account uses GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise Cloud", and they always "require a valid payment method".
• Copilot code review "consumes GitHub Actions compute in addition to AI credits", and on private repositories it draws on the same included amount.

Standard runners in public repositories are free and don't touch the included amount. How many free minutes private repositories get lists everything that never counts.

How to see what's left

• An organization: Settings → Billing & Licensing (under Access in the sidebar). The overview shows the month's Actions use, and the Usage view filters and groups it, by SKU for example. GitHub notes that the dashboard "may show your Actions usage as a dollar amount ("spend") rather than raw minutes".
• A personal account: github.com/settings/billing.
• One run: GitHub shows "the billable job execution minutes for an individual workflow run" in the run's usage.

To hear before it runs out, open Budgets and alerts and select Receive alerts when my included usage reaches 90% and 100%. GitHub then emails you at each threshold.

To see which workflows spend it, the free cost calculator reads your usage report and prices each one by runner; how GitHub Actions billing works has the formula.

What happens when it runs out

It depends on two settings: a payment method, and a budget set to stop usage.

Either block holds until the 1st at 00:00 UTC, unless someone adds a payment method or raises the budget. Refused jobs don't start again on their own; re-run them.

Keep CI running until the 1st

Spend fewer billable minutes

• Cancel runs nobody reads. concurrency with cancel-in-progress: true cancels a run when a newer commit arrives on the same branch.
• Skip workflows a change doesn't touch. paths filters on push and pull_request keep a docs change from running the test suite.
• End hung jobs. timeout-minutes on a job stops it long before GitHub's 6-hour limit.
• Merge tiny jobs. Every job rounds up to a whole minute, so five 10-second jobs use 5 minutes and one job doing all five uses 1.
• Use the smallest runner that works. At GitHub's rates, a macOS minute takes more than 10 times what a Linux 2-core minute takes from the included amount.

GitHub Actions too expensive? has the YAML for each of these.

Move jobs to a self-hosted runner

Self-hosted runners don't use the included amount at all: GitHub lists them as usage that "remains free independently and does not reduce the included compute usage". A job moved to one keeps running after the included amount is used up, and no budget stops it.

Skipbox runs self-hosted runners for you. Change a private repository's job to runs-on: skipbox and it runs in a fresh Linux VM in Helsinki, on an organization or a personal account, at $39, $79 or $149 a month with unlimited minutes. Your plan sets how many jobs run at once; extra jobs wait their turn, and the bill doesn't change. The free trial runs one job at a time at 4 vCPU and 8 GB. macOS, Windows, Arm and public-repository jobs stay on GitHub. To move a job back after the 1st, change its runs-on line back.

You can try it on your own jobs first: free for 7 days or 3,000 job-minutes, no card.

Sources

All read on 2026-11-09.

• GitHub Docs, Billing cycles: the metered billing period in UTC, the reset of the included compute, the billing date.
• GitHub Docs, GitHub Actions billing: included compute by plan "expressed as a monetary amount", what draws on it, what remains free, storage, blocking without a payment method, Copilot code review.
• GitHub Docs, Actions runner pricing: per-minute rates, rounding up per job.
• GitHub Docs, Budgets and alerts and Setting up budgets: the stop option, included usage alerts at 90% and 100%.
• GitHub Docs, Viewing your usage of metered products and licenses: where the usage is.
• GitHub Docs, Actions limits: the 6-hour job limit on GitHub-hosted runners.
• github/docs, commit 8e7396e5e (October 28, 2026): the included minutes rewritten as dollars.

Updated November 9, 2026