Downgrade billing bug

[TheBlackCatnull]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Verification Help & Guidance

Hi everyone,

Hello,

My GitHub Education student benefits were verified and activated on March 14, 2026.

As part of my student benefits, I originally had access to Copilot Pro. Later, on April 6, 2026, I upgraded to Copilot Pro+ with a paid subscription.

On June 5, 2026, I decided not to continue the Pro+ subscription and downgraded. However, after the downgrade, my account was automatically changed to Copilot Free, and my student Copilot benefits also disappeared.

Since I still have GitHub Education student benefits, I expected my account to return to the student Copilot plan after canceling Pro+, rather than losing student access entirely.

Could you please help restore my student Copilot benefits?

GitHub username: TheBlackCatnull

Thank you for your help.

[Crackle2K]

Unfortunately the community here can't restore account benefits or make changes to your GitHub account directly. For this you need to go through official support at support.github.com and open a ticket referencing your Education verification date and the downgrade. Make sure to mention that your student Copilot benefit disappeared after canceling the Pro+ subscription, not just the paid plan itself, since that's the specific issue they'll need to look into on their end. That said, what you're describing does sound like a known edge case where upgrading from a student benefit plan to a paid tier and then canceling doesn't cleanly revert to the original benefit state. Support should be able to fix it manually once they look at your account history.

[tanvishinde017]

Hi @TheBlackCatnull,

Based on recent Copilot plan changes, downgrading from a paid plan should normally return eligible users to their previous plan rather than permanently removing GitHub Education benefits.

Since your Student Developer Pack is still active, this may simply be a synchronization or account state issue.

A couple of things to check:

• Confirm that your GitHub Education benefits are still shown as active at https://education.github.com/benefits.
• Verify your current Copilot plan under Settings → Billing and plans → Copilot.
• Sometimes benefit changes can take some time to propagate after a subscription change.

Since this appears to involve account-specific subscription data, only GitHub staff can fully investigate or restore benefits if something went wrong. Hopefully a member of the GitHub Education or Copilot team can take a look.

Also, for privacy, you may want to avoid posting additional personal information beyond your GitHub username.