Billing for Copilot CLI on action using GITHUB_TOKEN - cost centre support

[matt-buchanan]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot CLI

Body

Had been eagerly anticipating this annoucement: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-02-copilot-cli-no-longer-needs-a-personal-access-token-in-github-actions/ but this only supports billing to the organisation. Why doesn't this support billing via a cost centre?

Other repo costs, incl. action minutes, will bill to a cost centre if a repo is aligned, so why not this? The guidance for GitHub for enterprise has always been to minimise the number of organisations, but this seems to go against that, and will inevitably drive the creation of additional orgs.

[ymxlx]

This is supported, but the cost-centre boundary is the organization, not the repository, when the workflow authenticates with GITHUB_TOKEN.

GITHUB_TOKEN authenticates the workflow as an installation, so there isn't an individual user attached. In an organization-owned repository, GitHub meters the AI credit usage directly to that organization.

I suggest assigning the existing organization to the appropriate cost centre. You shouldn't need to create another organization if all of its repositories belong to the same cost centre.

There's one limitation: if repositories inside the same organization need to be billed to different cost centres, GITHUB_TOKEN can't represent that split today. GitHub Actions usage can use repository assignment, but Copilot CLI usage authenticated this way is attributed at the organization level.

GitHub explains the authentication and billing behavior here: Copilot CLI in GitHub Actions. The product-specific rules are here: Cost center allocation for different products.

[blazee14]

Good catch, and I agree it's a notable gap. Based on the changelog, this GITHUB_TOKEN billing mechanism only supports attributing spend at the organization level — there's no mention of cost center integration for this specific flow.
Interestingly, GitHub did roll out cost center spending caps (via REST API) around the same time, but that appears to apply to Copilot usage broadly, not specifically to this new Actions authentication mechanism. This might be a v1 limitation (since the Actions token lives at the repo/org level, while cost centers may sit in a different layer of the billing architecture) rather than an intentional product decision.
Since there's no documented official reasoning for this specific restriction, I'd suggest:

Submitting feedback directly through GitHub Support or the Copilot feedback channel, laying out exactly the scenario you described here (avoiding org proliferation just to separate cost centers).
Checking if there's a public GitHub Copilot Enterprise roadmap where this might already be planned.

Your point about this contradicting GitHub's own guidance to minimize organization count is fair — worth getting that in as formal feedback rather than just in this forum, since product team visibility here is limited.