GitHub to charge $0.002/min for self-hosted runners starting March 2026

Dec 17, 2025

Update Dec 17th 2025: GitHub has suspended ↗ the fee for now.

GitHub recently announced ↗ that starting March 2026, they will begin charging $0.002 per minute for jobs running on self-hosted runners, including those managed by e.g. Actions Runner Controller (ARC) or other solutions like RunsOn.

What does this mean?

Until now, self-hosted runners have been free to use on GitHub Actions - you only paid for your own infrastructure costs. Starting March 2026, GitHub will add a per-minute fee on top of your infrastructure costs for any job running on a self-hosted runner.

For context:

$0.002/min = $0.12/hour = $2.88/day for a runner running 24 hours
For 40,000 minutes/month: additional $80/month in GitHub fees
For 100,000 minutes/month: additional $200/month in GitHub fees

How does this affect RunsOn users?

RunsOn will continue to provide significant cost savings compared to GitHub-hosted runners, even with this additional fee. However, the savings margin will be reduced for some runner configurations.

To help you understand the impact, we’ve updated our pricing tools:

Updated Pricing Table

Our pricing page now includes a toggle to show prices with or without the GitHub self-hosted runner fee. This lets you compare:

Current pricing (without the fee)
Post-March 2026 pricing (with the $0.002/min fee included)

Updated Calculator

The pricing calculator has also been updated with the same toggle. You can now see exactly how much you’ll save with RunsOn both before and after the fee takes effect.

RunsOn still delivers major savings

Even with the additional GitHub fee, RunsOn remains significantly cheaper than GitHub-hosted runners for most configurations:

Spot instances: Still deliver 60-90% savings depending on runner size
On-demand instances: Still deliver 30-60% savings for most configurations
Larger runners: The bigger the runner, the more you save (GitHub’s hosted runner pricing scales up faster than AWS EC2 pricing)

The fee has a larger impact on smaller runner sizes where the base cost is lower. For 2-CPU runners, the $0.002/min fee represents a larger percentage of the total cost.

What should you do?

Check your current usage: Review your GitHub Actions minutes to understand your monthly consumption
Use our calculator: Try the updated calculator with the fee toggle enabled to see your projected costs
Consider runner sizes: Larger runners provide better value as the fee is fixed per minute regardless of runner size
Use spot instances: AWS spot instances remain the most cost-effective option