I work on Sengi , a hosted runner service for GitHub Actions, and the Sengi rows below are ours. GitHub's figures are its published per-minute rates and included minutes, the ones in effect since January 1, 2026. Every line of arithmetic is on the page.

A GitHub Actions bill has two numbers in it: the minutes and the price per minute . Most advice goes after the minutes: cache more, skip jobs, split suites. All good. But both numbers are also set by the machine your job runs on, and that's the lever this post is about.

How to work out your bill by hand

Take last month's job-minutes.

On standard runners in private repositories, subtract your plan's included minutes: 2,000 on GitHub Free, 3,000 on Pro and Team, 50,000 on Enterprise Cloud.

Multiply what's left by the runner's rate: $0.006 a minute for Linux 2-core, $0.012 for 4-core, $0.022 for 8-core.

Larger runners skip step 2. Included minutes never apply to them, so GitHub bills a 4- or 8-core job from its first minute.…