Reduce your GitHub Actions costs

A CI bill is runs, times minutes per run, times the price of a minute. Work on them in that order: a run you avoid saves all of its minutes, a shorter run saves some, and a cheaper minute saves a share of what's left.

Measure first

Find what you're paying for before you change anything:

• Your bill: GitHub's billing pages break usage down by repository and runner.
• Where runs repeat: when you set hushrun up with the GitHub CLI signed in, npx hushrun init counts how often CI ran again on code it had already passed in the last 30 days.
• What a repeat costs you: the CI waste calculator takes your pushes, pipeline minutes and price, and prints its formula.

Run less often

• Trigger on fewer events. A workflow on both push and pull_request runs twice for every push to a pull request's branch. Why CI runs the same tests twice covers each route.
• Cancel superseded runs. concurrency with cancel-in-progress: true stops a run when a newer push makes it pointless.
• Filter what can't matter. paths-ignore for documentation, keeping in mind what happens to required checks.
• Skip what already passed. hushrun run skips a check when this exact code passed it, including on a laptop or in a coding agent's sandbox. See Skip CI when the code hasn't changed.

Make each run shorter

• Cache dependencies. actions/cache, or the cache option of actions/setup-node and its siblings. GitHub keeps 10 GB per repository by default and evicts what's unused for 7 days. A cache restores files; it doesn't decide whether a job should run.
• Fail fast. Run lint and typecheck before the long test suite, so a typo doesn't cost a full run.
• Trim the matrix. Test every version and operating system on main or on a schedule, and one combination on pull requests.
• Split long test suites. Shards finish sooner but bill the same minutes, or more. Split for feedback, not for the bill.

Pay less per minute

GitHub's per-minute prices for its standard runners, checked in November 2026:

• Move what you can to Linux. A job that runs on macOS only by habit costs about ten times as much as on 2-core Linux.
• Use the 1-core runner for light jobs. Lint and other short checks may not need more, at a third of the price.
• Try arm64. It's the cheapest 2-core option, for builds that support it.
• Consider another runner. Third-party runner services and self-hosted machines change the price. They don't change how many minutes your pushes start, so do this after the steps above.

GitHub cut its hosted prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026. A lower price helps, but coding agents raise the number of runs: see Keep CI useful with coding agents.

An example

Say 20 pushes a working day go to staging and then to production, each starting a 12-minute pipeline on 2-core Linux at $0.006, for 22 working days a month:

20 pushes × 2 branches × 12 minutes × 22 days = 10,560 minutes
10,560 minutes × $0.006                       = $63.36 a month

Half of those minutes test files that already passed, so removing the repeats saves half the bill. Moving to arm64 instead would save about a sixth. The calculator runs this with your numbers.

Related

• Why CI runs the same tests twice
• Cache test results across machines
• Plans and limits