Actions jobs refuse to start on Enterprise Cloud with $0 past due, valid card, no budgets

[ZiyueYang-Ulyssify]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

Since 2026-09-15 ~08:00 UTC, every GitHub Actions job in our organization (Ulyssify, enterprise account: harnest, GitHub Enterprise Cloud) fails before its first step with:

The job was not started because recent account payments have failed or your spending limit needs to be increased. Please check the 'Billing & plans' section in your settings

This affects every branch, scheduled workflows and manual workflow_dispatch runs. Example runs: 34945879292 (PR), 35002737756, 35003079707, 35004027684, 35004152225, 35005563051 (workflow_dispatch probes). Each job shows 0 steps. Further probes at 19:05 UTC (35011516548) and 00:23 UTC Sep 16 (35039780160) still fail identically, 16 hours after onset; a self-hosted runner in the same org runs jobs normally throughout. Payment history shows no failed or retryable charge.

What the billing pages and the billing API show:

• Enterprise billing overview: past due $0, valid payment method, next scheduled payment 2026-09-19.
• Budgets: none at enterprise scope, none at cost-center scope; the only Actions budget is org-scoped, alert-only ("Stop usage when budget limit is reached" is OFF). We have since raised it to $2,000 and added an alert-only $2,000 enterprise budget; no change.
• Metered usage this month: $1,308.83 gross / $1,008.42 net, all Actions. The included 50,000 minutes were exhausted around Sept 6 and overage was billed normally for nine days.
• The block began within the hour our cumulative usage crossed $1,000.
• Re-saving the payment method produced a successful $500.00 preauthorization from GitHub (confirmed by the card issuer), yet probes 5 and 25 minutes later still failed with the same annotation.

So neither half of the message matches anything visible: no payment has failed and no spending limit exists. This looks identical to Discussion #199036 (June 2026: Team-plan org, valid card, ~$1,000 Actions spend, same annotation, unresolved for days).

Support ticket: enterprise ticket #4761348 (filed 2026-09-15). All CI/CD for the company has been down since 08:00 UTC.

Questions for GitHub:

1. Is there an internal per-account threshold on unbilled metered usage (around $1,000) that stops GitHub-hosted jobs, and how does a customer raise it or pay ahead? There is no prepay option in the billing UI.
2. If a mid-cycle authorization is required, why did the successful $500 preauthorization not unlock the account?

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