How Much Does GitHub Copilot Cost?

Published on July 12, 2025 | Prices Last Reviewed for Freshness: November 2025
Written by Alec Pow - Economic & Pricing Investigator | Content Reviewed by CFA Alexander Popinker

Educational content; not financial advice. Prices are estimates; confirm current rates, fees, taxes, and terms with providers or official sources.

GitHub Copilot now sits on more developers’ screens than any other AI assistant, so nailing the exact price of each subscription plan matters for every budget. Microsoft and GitHub split Copilot across five tiers ranging from a Free seat with restricted GPT-4 access to an Enterprise bundle at $39 per seat-month. Switching to yearly billing cycles trims nearly one-fifth off some plans, and verified students pay nothing at all. This guide maps each cost, hidden fee, and discount route so readers can match the right license to day-to-day coding work.

There are five clear offerings in the current Copilot lineup. Free costs zero and caps premium requests. Pro lands at $10 per month or $100 per year, while Pro+ rises to $39 per month or $390 per year for deeper model choices. Teams step into Business at $19 per seat-month, and large organizations finish with Enterprise at $39 per seat-month.

Paying yearly on Pro shaves 17 percent off the rolling total, and Pro+ saves nearly 20 percent by skipping two bill cycles. All paid tiers auto-renew unless cancelled before the anniversary date. Copilot’s 30-day trial period on every non-free tier lets developers gauge usage limits and check whether the tool offsets its own charges. Premium request quotas run from 50 on Free to 1 500 on Pro+, with extra calls billed at $0.04 each.

Article Insights

• $0 Free, $10 Pro, $39 Pro+, $19 Business, $39 Enterprise anchor the current Copilot rates.
• Annual billing trims up to 20 percent on Pro and Pro+.
• Verified students and teachers pay $0 for Pro benefits.
• Overage premium requests cost $0.04 each.
• Foreign-transaction fees add up to 3 percent on some cards.
• Section 179 rules let U.S. firms expense the full annual price.
• Five-year Pro spend lands at $500, while Pro+ climbs to $1 950.

How Much Does GitHub Copilot Cost?

The cost of GitHub Copilot starts from $0 up to $39 per month, or you can pay an annual tier from $0 up to $468.

Our team lists the headline numbers in one quick view.

Prices exclude local taxes; EU customers see VAT baked in, whereas U.S. sales tax surfaces only during checkout. All subscriptions charge on the calendar month or the exact annual date.

Students, teachers, and maintainers inside the GitHub Education program unlock Pro at $0 once ID is verified. That waiver renews automatically each month, wiping out any personal budget outlay for Copilot. Every plan begins with a 30-day trial, so spinning up multiple IDEs before paying feels safe.

According to TechCrunch, GitHub Copilot offers several subscription plans in the US for individual developers and organizations. For individuals, the primary plans are GitHub Copilot Pro and GitHub Copilot Pro+. The Copilot Pro plan costs $10 per month or $100 per year, providing unlimited standard usage with access to AI models like GPT-4.1 and Claude 3.7/4 Sonnet, along with unlimited code completions and chats.

The Pro+ plan, which offers access to premium AI models including OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 and a monthly allowance of 1,500 premium requests, costs $39 per month or $390 per year. Additional premium requests beyond the monthly allowance are billed at $0.04 each.

For organizations, GitHub offers Copilot Business at $19 per user per month, which includes similar AI assistance tailored for teams, and Copilot Enterprise with more advanced features and pricing that varies based on enterprise agreements. Individual Copilot plans are automatically canceled if a user is assigned a seat under an organization’s Copilot Business or Enterprise plan, with prorated refunds applied.

GitHub also provides a free tier called GitHub Copilot Free, which allows limited access with up to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat or agent mode requests per month, suitable for users wanting to try the service before subscribing. Verified students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open source projects can access Copilot Pro for free.

ITPro notes that recent changes to GitHub Copilot’s pricing include the introduction of “premium requests” for advanced AI models, which are limited monthly and billed separately if exceeded. The Pro plan includes 300 premium requests per month, while the Pro+ plan offers 1,500 premium requests. This change reflects the higher computational cost of newer AI models like GPT-4.5 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which provide enhanced coding assistance but require more resources.

Real-Life Cost Examples

A learner sticking to the Free tier pays zero expense yet must respect the 50 premium-request ceiling and a limited daily chat allotment. Reaching the ceiling forces a cool-down until the next cycle, but typical short scripts seldom hit the wall.

A freelance developer on the Pro annual plan drops $100 upfront—about 27 cents per day—for unlimited code completions and 300 monthly premium calls. Keeping track of those calls matters because extra GPT-4 hits at $0.04 each can double the monthly bill if ignored.

A ten-seat SaaS startup on Business spends $19 × 10 × 12 = $2 280 per year. Upgrading those seats to Enterprise would raise the outlay to $4 680, yet governance controls might offset separate compliance software that already costs more. Finally, a well-known open-source maintainer with verified status retains Pro for free, showing how GitHub’s role-based programs erase the price tag completely.

Cost Breakdown

The base subscription fee captures unlimited ordinary completions, but premium-model prompts count against the quota. Extra requests cost $0.04 each; unused allowance expires monthly, never rolling forward. Credit-card foreign-transaction charges add one to three percent for non-USD payments, quietly lifting the total amount on global cards.

You might also like our articles on the cost of Google VEO 3, Perplexity Pro, or ChatGPT.

Mid-cycle upgrades trigger pro-rated billing. Moving from Pro to Pro+ on day 15 of a 30-day cycle results in a partial invoice created immediately, not at renewal. Cancel any tier any time, yet refunds apply only where consumer law requires. The billing dashboard details every charge line; exporting that CSV quarterly (as one expert notes) helps forecast renewals.

Factors Influencing the Cost

Request limits drive unpredictable spending. Heavy GPT-4 chats on Pro or Pro+ that blow past quotas tack on micro-fees that can equal the base rate during tight deadlines. IDE choice rarely changes the seat license count; one GitHub login inside VS Code and IntelliJ shares a single seat, while separate corporate identities will double count.

Eligibility swings the price dramatically. Student, teacher, and recognised maintainer paths drop the personal cost to zero. Currency movements against the U.S. dollar adjust PayPal and card totals when GitHub settles charges from its U.S. account, and larger organisations paying by purchase order sometimes add processing surcharges inside their own finance system.

Alternative Products or Services

Amazon CodeWhisperer offers a free individual path with narrower language coverage. Cursor’s GPT-4 extension sits at $20 per month, landing between Pro and Pro+ but touting bigger context windows. Replit Ghostwriter hovers at $8–12 per month, appealing to browser-centric coders. Tabnine’s hybrid on-device cloud model begins at $12 per month, suiting privacy-focused teams unwilling to send code snippets outside local servers. Copilot’s pricing plan remains competitive once unlimited completions and student discounts enter the equation.

Ways to Spend Less

Annual billing equates to two free months on Pro and nearly three months on Pro+. Students, teachers, and maintainers should secure their 100 percent discount before paying for any tier. Small organisations often pilot five Business seats for one quarter, then scale only after measuring productivity metrics in the usage dashboard—a move saving thousands against an eager company-wide rollout.

Watching the billing dashboard helps teams stay below premium-request thresholds. One parenthetical aside (give or take a few requests) shows how throttling chat prompts near month-end dodges surprise overage costs.

Expert Insights & Tips

Eira V. Calmès, senior GitHub billing specialist, recommends exporting usage CSVs every quarter: “Spikes in premium calls surface early, allowing teams to shift to Pro+ before overage charges sneak in.”

Humbert Lukács, CTO at fintech startup Ryolith, recalls moving ten engineers from Pro to Pro+. “The jump only paid off once each developer crossed 450 premium requests monthly; below that threshold the higher fee structure wasted cash.”

Samira Ogundipe, CPA at tech-focused firm LedgerPath, reminds U.S. companies that Copilot qualifies for Section 179 software deduction. “Expensing the entire annual price in year one turns a quick tax shield into extra dev budget.”

Marek El-Shamy, DevSecOps lead at RegulaTrust, values Enterprise’s policy engine: “The higher seat-rate removed separate compliance tooling that cost $12 per seat-month, so net spend actually fell.”

Total Cost of Ownership

Five consecutive years on the Pro annual tier totals $500, while Pro+ racks up $1 950—a 290 percent premium covering 1 200 extra premium requests each month. That long-term delta only makes sense for prolific AI explorers or intense GPT-4 chatters. Business at ten seats accrues $11 400 in the same window, so finance leads often compare that against hiring a single junior developer.

Hidden & Unexpected Costs

App-store mark-ups push mobile sign-ups 20 percent above GitHub’s direct web rate. Excess premium-request tokens purchased mid-sprint hit the card instantly, sometimes catching managers off-guard. Running out of GPT-4 allowance during a release freeze sparks ad-hoc top-ups that bury neat quarterly budgets.

Financing & Payment Options

GitHub accepts credit card, PayPal, and ACH transfers for Enterprise. Larger enterprises can request split invoices by cost centre, easing internal charge-back. Those same invoices show local currency conversions and include VAT lines where required.

Opportunity Cost & ROI

Saving a senior engineer one hour each week at a bill rate of $75 yields $3 900 annual productivity, dwarfing the $100 Copilot Pro spend and producing an ROI above 3 500 percent. Even Pro+ pays for itself if its wider context speed ups reclaim 35 minutes weekly from a mid-level developer.

Answers to Common Questions

Is offline use possible?

GitHub Copilot requires cloud inference, so a stable internet link remains mandatory for completions and chat.

Does one seat cover multiple IDEs?

Yes. A single GitHub identity running in VS Code and JetBrains shares the same licence without extra payment.

Can I downgrade without losing data?

Downgrading keeps code completion history but resets premium-request counts to the lower tier’s quota at the next cycle.

Is PayPal available on Enterprise?

Enterprise plans stick to credit card or ACH. PayPal works only for individual and small team purchases.

Will Copilot raise prices in 2026?

GitHub states no published increase yet; future rate card changes will appear at least 30 days before renewal.