What was wrong with the GitHub Actions numbers on your calculator?

Every rate was the pre-January-2026 price. Linux 2-core was shown at $0.008/minute instead of the current $0.006. Linux 4-core was $0.016 instead of $0.012. Windows was $0.016 instead of $0.010. macOS was $0.08 instead of $0.062. GitHub cut all four on January 1, 2026 and our page never caught up -- it sat there for ten months quoting a bill that was already out of date the day most people would have first read it this year.

What are the current GitHub Actions per-minute rates?

As of the January 2026 cut: Linux 2-core (x64) is $0.006/minute, Linux 2-core (arm64) is $0.005/minute, Linux 4-core is $0.012/minute, Windows 2-core is $0.010/minute, and macOS (3-4 core) is $0.062/minute. Free included minutes on private repos are unchanged: 2,000/month on Free, 3,000/month on Team, 50,000/month on Enterprise Cloud. Public repos still get unlimited minutes on GitHub-hosted runners.

How much difference does the rate cut actually make on a real bill?

Take a team on the Team plan (3,000 free minutes) running 10,000 Linux minutes and 500 macOS minutes a month. At the old rates that's (10,000-3,000) x $0.008 + 500 x $0.08 = $96/month. At the current rates it's 7,000 x $0.006 + 500 x $0.062 = $73/month. That's $23/month, about 24% lower, on a workload that didn't change at all -- GitHub just got cheaper underneath it in January, and our calculator was still charging the January price in October.

Why didn't you catch this sooner?

Because the comparison prose on our GitHub Actions vs CircleCI vs Buildkite page already had the correct $0.006/minute figure -- we'd fixed the number in one place and never propagated it to the standalone calculator's pricing table, or to any of the seven translated copies of that page. A number can be right on one page and wrong on its sibling page for months if nothing ever diffs them against each other, which is exactly what happened here.

Our GitHub Actions Calculator Was Still Running January's Prices

25 October 2026 · Site Methodology & Corrections · 4 min read

GitHub cut its Actions per-minute rates on January 1, 2026. I didn't notice our own calculator never got the memo until I pulled GitHub's current billing page tonight for an unrelated comparison and the numbers didn't match what our page was showing. Every single rate on it -- Linux, Linux 4-core, Windows, macOS -- was the old, higher price. Ten months of visitors got a bigger number than reality.

What the page actually had

Four rates, all stale, all in the same direction (too high):

Runner	Our page showed	Actual rate	Overstated by
Linux 2-core	$0.008/min	$0.006/min	33%
Linux 4-core	$0.016/min	$0.012/min	33%
Windows 2-core	$0.016/min	$0.010/min	60%
macOS (3-4 core)	$0.08/min	$0.062/min	29%

The Windows number was the worst one -- our page had it at $0.016, which happened to equal our (also wrong) 4-core Linux figure, like whoever built the table copy-pasted a row instead of pulling the real Windows rate. GitHub's actual Windows 2-core price isn't a clean multiple of anything Linux-side anymore; it's just $0.010, flat.

How I caught it, and why it took ten months

The weirdest part: the correct $0.006/minute figure was already sitting one page over, in the prose on our GitHub Actions vs CircleCI vs Buildkite comparison. Someone had fixed the number there and never touched the standalone calculator's pricing table -- or any of the seven translated copies of it. A fact can be right on one page and wrong on its sibling for months if nothing ever diffs the two against each other. That's exactly what happened. I only found it because I fetched GitHub's live billing docs for a different reason and the $0.006 didn't line up with the $0.008 our own calculator was computing against.

What it changes on a real bill

Take a team on GitHub's Team plan -- 3,000 free Actions minutes a month -- running 10,000 Linux minutes and 500 macOS minutes beyond that free allowance.

Old (wrong) math: (10,000 − 3,000) × $0.008 + 500 × $0.08 = $56 + $40 = $96/month.
Correct math: 7,000 × $0.006 + 500 × $0.062 = $42 + $31 = $73/month.

Same workload, same team, $23/month lower -- about 24% -- because GitHub already gave everyone this discount in January and our page spent ten months not telling anyone. Nobody overpaid GitHub because of us; the bug only ever pointed people toward a number scarier than their real bill. Still wrong, just wrong in the less damaging direction.

Fixed, and what I'm actually doing differently

All four rates on the calculator and its seven language copies are corrected and re-dated today. The actual lesson isn't "double-check GitHub" specifically -- it's that a correct number in one place on a site tells you nothing about a related number three clicks away. Pages that quote the same underlying price in prose form and in a JS pricing table need to be checked against each other, not just against the vendor, because they can silently diverge from one another even after someone fixes one of them.

GitHub Actions cost calculator — corrected rates, re-verified today.
GitHub Actions vs CircleCI vs Buildkite — the page that had the right number all along.
I Audited Our Own Pricing Pages Against the Vendors — the last time this happened, with three different vendors.

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Checked directly against GitHub's own billing documentation, 2026-10-25. Reference figures, not live quotes -- confirm current terms directly with GitHub before budgeting.