Table of Contents

• What Changed in May 2026
• How Per-Token Pricing Actually Works
• Who Benefits and Who Pays More
• What’s Still Free
• The Bottom Line for Developers

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GitHub Copilot just changed how it charges you—and if you’re a developer who relies on it daily, you need to understand the new per-token model before your next billing cycle hits.

What Changed in May 2026

Previously, GitHub Copilot operated on a
. Copilot Pro users paid $10/month for a set number of queries. The new system, rolled out in May 2026, replaces those query limits with
—a token-based system where each credit roughly equals one cent.

Here’s the breakdown:

| Plan | Monthly Cost | AI Credits | Credit Value |

|——|————-|———–|————–|

| Copilot Pro | $10/month | 1,000 credits | ~1 cent/credit |

| Copilot Business | $19/user/month | Varies by tier | ~1 cent/credit |

| Copilot Enterprise | $39/user/month | Higher limits | ~1 cent/credit |

The key change:
. Every input you send to the model, every output it generates, and every context chunk held in memory—all of it consumes credits.

How Per-Token Pricing Actually Works

A token is approximately
. So a 10,000-word codebase or document—roughly 12,000-13,000 tokens—consumes that many tokens from your monthly allocation in a single query.

The credit cost varies based on several factors:

• 
  : Frontier models like GPT-4.5 or Claude Opus cost more credits per token than smaller models like GPT-3.5
• 
  : Longer outputs consume more credits than shorter ones
• 
  : The data held in the LLM’s memory for context—larger codebases in context windows cost more
• 
  : Complex multi-agent queries cost significantly more than simple autocomplete

GitHub has confirmed that Copilot Pro users getting 1,000 credits at $10 means roughly
. A simple autocomplete might cost 2-5 credits. A complex multi-agent code refactoring task with a large codebase in context could consume 200-500+ credits in one shot.

Who Benefits and Who Pays More

• Developers who use mostly
  (auto-complete, one-line suggestions)
• Users who work with small codebases and don’t load massive context windows
• Programmers who use Copilot infrequently—credits roll over to a point

• Developers working with
  who constantly load 50K+ tokens into context
• Teams running
  where multiple AI sub-agents query simultaneously
• Power users who rely on frontier models (Claude Opus, GPT-4.5) for every query

What’s Still Free

GitHub made one thing clear:
—these are the basic auto-complete features similar to a phone’s text prediction. You won’t burn credits for:

• Single-line code suggestions
• Next Edit Diff suggestions
• Basic autocomplete within your editor

These free tiers stay in place even on the base Copilot Pro plan.

The Bottom Line for Developers

If you’re a casual Copilot user writing simple scripts, the new per-token model might actually save you money—you’ll likely consume fewer than 1,000 credits per month.

But if you’re a power user running complex multi-agent queries on large codebases, watch your credit usage carefully. One complex session could burn through weeks of your allocation.

: Monitor your Copilot usage dashboard weekly. If you notice credits depleting faster than expected, switch to smaller models for routine tasks and reserve frontier models for tasks that genuinely need them.

The era of “unlimited queries” is over—but the era of pay-for-what-you-use has begun. Whether you win or lose depends entirely on how you work.