GitHub Actions Windows runner cost per minute is $0.010 for the standard 2-core machine, against $0.006 for the equivalent Linux runner, read from GitHub's runner pricing reference on 21 September 2026. That is a 1.67 times premium rather than the tenfold one macOS carries, which is why Windows rarely dominates a bill on its own and almost always shows up as a matrix leg that nobody has questioned since it was added.

The same 8,000 minutes of runner time priced on each operating system at the standard per-minute rates published on docs.github.com and read on 21 September 2026.

A Windows minute is not expensive enough to be obvious and not cheap enough to ignore.…