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Managing Actions Cost

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classroom50-sync[bot] edited this page Aug 16, 2026 · 4 revisions

Managing Actions cost

Autograding runs in GitHub Actions in your organization, and GitHub bills the organization for those minutes, never the students. This page is the cost playbook: what grading spends, the levers that reduce it, and what happens when minutes run out.

What grading costs

  • The organization pays. GitHub Actions minutes are budgeted per organization. Student repositories are private, so their workflow runs count against the organization's included minutes.
  • The Team plan includes 3,000 minutes per month. Usage past that is billed, up to the organization's Actions spending limit.
  • Each run bills at least a minute. GitHub rounds every job up to the next minute, so even a near-empty grading run (a vacuous pass with no tests) bills about a minute.
  • In the default submission type, every push grades. An assignment in every-push mode grades each push to the default branch: five pushes in ten minutes are five graded runs. Multiply by class size to estimate an assignment's cost.

The levers, by impact

  1. Grade on submit only. Set the assignment's Submission type to A tagged commit (--submission-mode tag). Regular pushes then run nothing at all; grading happens only when a student submits. This is the biggest saver for large classrooms. See Which commits grade.
  2. Skip the built-in autograder where you don't need it. For assignments graded by hand or by your own CI, pick Do not use the built-in autograder; accept then installs no grading workflow at all. An assignment with no tests still runs a lightweight workflow to tag submissions, which uses far fewer minutes than grading.
  3. Pause autograding over a break. Per assignment, or organization-wide; the next section covers both and how Regrade all behaves afterward.
  4. Use self-hosted runners. Grading on your own hardware costs no GitHub Actions minutes. Set the assignment's runs-on to your runner labels; see The runtime block.
  5. Ask GitHub Education. Verified educators who need more minutes can contact the GitHub Education team, which can often help with additional credits.

Turning autograding off or pausing it

Beyond choosing when commits grade, you can turn the pipeline off entirely:

  • Per assignment, at creation — pick Do not use the built-in autograder (no_autograder in assignments.json). Accept installs no autograding workflow at all; a templated assignment's own CI workflows run instead, and score collection skips the assignment. Changeable later, but only affects repositories accepted from then on (existing ones keep their setup). See gh teacher reference.
  • Per assignment, temporarily — Pause autograding in the submissions page's Actions menu disables the autograde.yaml workflow in every student repository through GitHub's workflow-disable API. No files change, students' other workflows keep running, and Resume autograding re-enables it. Available on individual assignments using the built-in autograder (a single repository can also be paused from its row). A student with admin on their own repository can technically re-enable the workflow — a known limitation.
  • Org-wide — the organization settings' Pause autograding for all student repositories toggle narrows the organization's GitHub Actions policy to the config repository. This stops all workflows in student repositories, including any course CI — prefer the per-assignment pause unless that's what you want.

Catching up after a pause. Work pushed while autograding was off is not graded retroactively. After resuming, run Regrade all from the submissions page's Actions menu: it triggers one grading run per repository instead of one per missed push. Each repository's latest submission is re-run, and a never-graded repository is graded at its current state. See Grading a specific commit for the details of what a regrade re-runs.

The spending cap

Setup creates a $0 GitHub Actions spending cap, but only when the organization has none yet, so a runaway workflow can't run up a bill. A cap you set yourself is never modified. When the included minutes are exhausted, workflow runs are blocked until the next billing month or until you raise the limit in the organization's billing settings.

On enterprise-managed organizations, the cap often isn't readable and setup shows an advisory warning; see Couldn't verify the Actions spending cap.

Further reading

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