GitHub to charge for self-hosted Actions runners starting March 2026

GitHub plans to start charging for self-hosted Actions runners in March 2026, a notable shift for teams that have leaned on custom runners to control environments, improve performance, or dodge per-minute fees on GitHub-hosted compute. What’s notable here is the long runway: roughly a year-plus for organizations to inventory runner usage, model new costs, and decide whether to optimize, consolidate, or move certain workloads back to GitHub-hosted infrastructure (or elsewhere).

Under the hood, even “self-hosted” runners rely on GitHub’s control plane-job orchestration, logs, artifacts, permissions, and concurrency management-which isn’t free to operate at scale. Charging for that layer aligns the business model with how Actions is actually consumed and may curb abuse. The bigger picture is a continued normalization of CI/CD pricing around orchestration and governance rather than just raw compute. Expect pragmatic knock-on effects: tighter autoscaling policies, fewer always-on runners, more selective use of GPU/ARM/macOS fleets, and closer scrutiny of ephemeral runner pools. Worth noting: details matter-pricing units, plan differences, and any migration incentives will determine how disruptive this is. Until then, the safe move is to audit workflows, tag and measure runner usage, and prepare a playbook for rebalancing jobs across runner types once the numbers land.