# 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 [GitHub Actions cost calculator](https://hushrun.com/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](https://hushrun.com/docs/guides/duplicate-ci-runs.md) 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- **Cancel superseded runs.** `concurrency` with `cancel-in-progress: true` stops a run when a newer push makes it pointless.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](https://hushrun.com/docs/guides/skip-ci.md#required-checks).
- **Count what else uses your minutes.** Since June 1, 2026, each Copilot code review on a private repository [uses Actions minutes](https://github.blog/changelog/2026-04-27-github-copilot-code-review-will-start-consuming-github-actions-minutes-on-june-1-2026/).

## Make each run shorter

- **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](https://hushrun.com/docs/guides/skip-ci.md).
- **Cache dependencies.** `actions/cache`, or the cache option of `actions/setup-node` and its siblings. GitHub keeps [10 GB per repository by default](https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflows-and-actions/dependency-caching) 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](https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-pricing) for its standard runners, checked in November 2026. [GitHub Actions pricing in 2026](https://hushrun.com/docs/guides/github-actions-pricing.md) adds larger runners, what each plan includes and what's free:

| Runner | Price per minute |
|---|---|
| Linux 1-core, x64 | $0.002 |
| Linux 2-core, arm64 | $0.005 |
| Linux 2-core, x64 | $0.006 |
| Windows 2-core | $0.010 |
| macOS 3-core or 4-core | $0.062 |

- **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](https://github.com/resources/insights/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions). A lower price helps, but coding agents raise the number of runs: see [Keep CI useful with coding agents](https://hushrun.com/docs/guides/coding-agents-ci.md).

## 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:

```text
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](https://hushrun.com/calculator) runs this with your numbers.

## Related

- [GitHub Actions pricing in 2026](https://hushrun.com/docs/guides/github-actions-pricing.md)
- [Why CI runs the same tests twice](https://hushrun.com/docs/guides/duplicate-ci-runs.md)
- [Cache test results across machines](https://hushrun.com/docs/guides/cache-test-results.md)
- [Plans and limits](https://hushrun.com/docs/plans.md)