GitHub Copilot Free vs Student vs Pro vs Pro+ vs Max vs Business vs Enterprise

GitHub Copilot Free vs Student vs Pro vs Pro+ vs Max vs Business vs EnterpriseGitHub Copilot Fundamentals4Beginner/github-copilot/getting-started/plans-comparison/

GitHub Copilot now has seven plans, and the lineup has changed materially enough that most comparison articles you will find are describing a product that no longer exists. Copilot Max did not exist a few months ago. The billing metric is no longer “premium requests”. The free tier for students is a distinct plan rather than a discount.

This page compares all seven on the things that actually determine which one you should buy: price, included usage, model access, which agents you get, and — the factor that decides most team purchases — governance.

Key takeaways

• Seven plans: Free, Student, Pro, Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise.
• Included usage is denominated in AI credits. Paid individual plans split the allowance into fixed base credits plus a variable flex allotment.
• The jump from Free to any other plan is not about volume — it is about getting the cloud agent, unlimited completions and real model choice.
• The jump from individual to Business is not about volume either. It is about governance: content exclusion, policy management, organisation instructions and audit logs.
• If you are a student, verify. Copilot Student is free and beats Copilot Free substantially.

The lineup at a glance

Price and audience for every GitHub Copilot plan, verified August 20, 2026.

Capability	Free	Student	Pro	Pro+	Max	Business	Enterprise
Monthly price	Free	Free	$10 USD	$39 USD	$100 USD	$19 USD	$39 USD
Billing note	—	Verification required	per month (free for verified teachers and popular OSS maintainers)	per month	per month	per granted seat per month	per granted seat per month
Intended for	Individuals without org access	Verified students	Individual developers	AI power users	High-volume individual users	Organisations and teams	Enterprises on GitHub Enterprise Cloud
Seat management	Individual subscription	Individual subscription	Individual subscription	Individual subscription	Individual subscription	Administrator-granted seats	Administrator-granted seats

Three of these deserve immediate comment.

Copilot Free is a genuine free tier, not a trial. It does not expire. But it is capped at 2,000 completions per month, reaches models only through auto selection, and — the limitation that matters most — does not include the Copilot cloud agent.

Copilot Student is free for verified students and is a substantially better deal than Copilot Free: unlimited completions, an AI credit allowance, and the cloud agent. If you are eligible and you are on Copilot Free, you are leaving value on the table.

Copilot Max at $100 USD per month is the newest tier, aimed at people whose agent usage consistently exhausts Pro+ before the month ends.

How AI credits work

This is the part most comparisons get wrong, because the model changed.

Every plan includes a monthly allowance of AI credits. For paid individual plans, that allowance comes in two parts:

• Base credits — matched one-to-one with your subscription price, and fixed. GitHub does not change these.
• Flex allotment — a variable amount on top, which GitHub can adjust as model pricing and efficiency change.

Base credits are consumed first; the flex allotment is applied automatically afterwards, at the same rates across your IDE, GitHub.com and Copilot CLI.

Included monthly usage for every GitHub Copilot plan, verified August 20, 2026.

Capability	Free	Student	Pro	Pro+	Max	Business	Enterprise
Base AI creditsMatched 1:1 with the subscription price. Fixed.	A limited allowance of GitHub AI Credits	An allowance of GitHub AI Credits	1,000	3,900	10,000	1,900 per user per month, pooled	3,900 per user per month, pooled
Flex allotmentVariable additional usage GitHub can adjust.	—	—	500	3,100	10,000	—	—
Total monthly AI credits	A limited allowance of GitHub AI Credits	An allowance of GitHub AI Credits	1,500	7,000	20,000	1,900	3,900
Code completion	2,000 completions per month	Unlimited completions	Unlimited completions	Unlimited completions	Unlimited completions	Unlimited completions	Unlimited completions
Model access	Auto model selection only	Auto model selection only	A selection of models	Access to premium models	Priority access to premium models	Broad catalog, including premium	Priority access to new models and features

Three practical points:

1. Credits do not carry over. An unused allowance expires at the end of the month.
2. Different models consume credits at different rates. A heavy reasoning model costs more per request than a fast one, which makes model selection a cost decision as well as a quality one.
3. Running out is not a hard stop. You can upgrade, or set an “Additional usage” budget to buy more credits. GitHub also applies rate limiting independently of credits, to protect capacity.

Features by plan

Agents, review and tooling for every GitHub Copilot plan, verified August 20, 2026.

Capability	Free	Student	Pro	Pro+	Max	Business	Enterprise
Agent mode (in your IDE)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Copilot cloud agent	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Third-party agentsPublic preview.	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Copilot code review	Only "Review selection" in VS Code	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Copilot CLI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
MCP servers	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

The single most consequential row here is Copilot cloud agent. It is the only major capability entirely absent from Copilot Free, and it is present on every other plan including the free Student tier. If you want to delegate work asynchronously and get a pull request back, Copilot Free is not the plan.

Two rows that surprise people:

• Agent mode is on every plan, including Free. The in-IDE supervised agent is not a paid upsell.
• Copilot CLI is on every plan, including Free. The terminal agent is universally available.

Copilot code review is included everywhere too, but on Copilot Free it is restricted to “Review selection” in VS Code rather than full pull request review on GitHub.com.

Third-party agents, currently in public preview, are the one capability excluded from both Free and Student while being present on every paid tier.

Model access

Model availability is where the paid individual tiers actually differentiate.

The honest guidance here runs against the marketing: for most everyday coding, model choice matters considerably less than context quality. A well-specified request with the right files open on a mid-tier model beats a vague request on the most expensive model available.

Premium models earn their cost on tasks that require holding many constraints simultaneously — a multi-file refactor with subtle invariants, or debugging something where the cause is several steps from the symptom. If your work is mostly implementation of known patterns, Pro is not obviously limiting you.

Organisation and enterprise controls

Governance and administration for every GitHub Copilot plan, verified August 20, 2026.

Capability	Free	Student	Pro	Pro+	Max	Business	Enterprise
Organisation custom instructions	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Content exclusion	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Organisation-wide policy management	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Audit logs	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

This table is why most companies end up on Business rather than buying individual seats, and it is worth being explicit about the reasoning.

None of these controls exist on any individual plan — not Pro, not Pro+, not even Max at $100 per month. Specifically:

• Content exclusion — keeping specified files out of Copilot’s context entirely — is Business and Enterprise only.
• Organisation custom instructions — conventions applied across every repository rather than per-repo — are Business and Enterprise only.
• Organisation-wide policy management — controlling which Copilot features are enabled — is Business and Enterprise only.
• Audit logs appear on Pro+ and Max, and on both organisation plans.

Business vs Enterprise

These two get compared least carefully, because the price gap ($19 versus $39 per seat) invites people to assume Enterprise is “Business with more”. The difference is narrower and more specific than that.

Both include the full governance set: organisation custom instructions, content exclusion, organisation-wide policy management and audit logs. If you are buying for compliance reasons, Business already satisfies the requirement.

Enterprise adds priority access to new models and features, and a larger pooled credit allowance per user — 3,900 credits per user per month against Business’s 1,900. It requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

The practical decision:

• Choose Business if you need control and your engineers’ usage fits within roughly 1,900 credits each per month. For teams whose Copilot use is mostly completions and chat, that is comfortable.
• Choose Enterprise if you are on GHEC and your engineers lean heavily on agents, or if being early to new models matters to how you work.

Enterprise owners can assign Copilot Enterprise or Copilot Business to individual organisations, or assign Business directly to users and teams — so a mixed allocation is possible where usage patterns differ across the company.

What the credits mean in practice

Credit allowances are abstract until you connect them to behaviour, and GitHub publishes a conversion that makes this concrete: one AI credit is $0.01 USD of usage.

That reframes the tiers usefully:

In each case the base credits match the subscription price exactly — that is what “matched 1:1” means — and the flex allotment is the additional margin on top. Pro’s flex allotment is 500 credits, Pro+‘s is 3,100, and Max’s is 10,000.

The consumption side is where behaviour matters. Inline completions are inexpensive. A chat exchange costs more. An agent-mode session that reads a dozen files, edits several, runs your test suite and iterates twice costs substantially more than either — and it costs more again on a premium reasoning model than on a fast one.

This produces a useful rule: your plan should be chosen by how you work, not by how much you work. Someone writing code for eight hours a day with completions and occasional chat may sit comfortably inside Pro. Someone who delegates four agent tasks a day on premium models will outgrow Pro+ regardless of total hours.

Which plan should you choose?

Best free choice

Copilot Free. Two thousand completions a month and auto-selected models are enough to work out whether AI assistance suits how you think. The hard ceiling is the cloud agent, which Free does not include. Treat it as an evaluation tier rather than a destination.

Best for students

Copilot Student. Verification converts a limited free tier into unlimited completions, an AI credit allowance, full code review and the cloud agent — at no cost. If you qualify, buying Pro first is simply a mistake.

Best for individual developers

Copilot Pro, at $10 USD per month. Unlimited completions, 1,500 total AI credits, model choice and the cloud agent. For a developer using chat and agent mode several times a day, this is the tier that fits, and most people never outgrow it.

Best for professional developers

Copilot Pro+, at $39 USD per month. The step up buys premium models — the Opus and GPT-5.5-class tiers — plus 7,000 total credits and audit logs. Worth it once you routinely hand agents multi-file work rather than single functions, and notice the difference in what comes back.

Best for heavy agent usage

Copilot Max, at $100 USD per month. Twenty thousand credits and priority access to new models. This is a throughput purchase, and the signal that you need it is concrete: you are consistently exhausting Pro+ before month end and paying for additional usage on top.

Best for teams

Copilot Business, at $19 USD per granted seat per month. Everything an individual plan offers plus the four things individual plans structurally cannot give a team: organisation custom instructions, content exclusion, policy management and audit logs.

Best for enterprise

Copilot Enterprise, at $39 USD per granted seat per month, for organisations on GitHub Enterprise Cloud. Adds priority model access and a larger pooled credit allowance on top of every Business control.

A decision path

If you want this as a sequence of questions rather than a table:

The order matters. Governance requirements and student eligibility both override volume considerations entirely, which is why they come first.

What none of the plans change

Worth stating, because plan-comparison pages tend to imply that a bigger tier buys a better outcome.

No plan makes Copilot correct. Every tier produces code that looks finished and is sometimes wrong, and the review burden is identical at $0 and at $100 a month. Premium models reduce the rate of certain failures; they do not change the category of the work.

No plan gives Copilot knowledge of your system. Your production incidents, your traffic shape, the reason that odd workaround exists — none of it is in any context window regardless of subscription.

No plan removes the need for context discipline. A repository custom instructions file improves output on Copilot Free exactly as much as on Max, and it is free.

This is worth internalising before an upgrade, because “I am getting mediocre results, so I will buy a bigger plan” is a common and usually wrong diagnosis. The more frequent cause is that Copilot cannot see what it needs to see.

Common mistakes when choosing

Buying Max to solve a context problem. If you are getting poor results, credits are rarely the constraint. Repository custom instructions and having the right files open will change your output more than a bigger allowance will.

Assuming a bigger individual plan gives you team controls. It does not, at any price. Governance is a Business/Enterprise feature.

Forgetting credits do not roll over. Buying a large allowance for occasional heavy months means paying for unused capacity most of the year. Additional usage budgets exist precisely for spiky consumption.

Overlooking the Student plan. It is free, it is materially better than Copilot Free, and eligibility is checked once.

Trusting a pricing article without a verification date. Including, in six months, this one — which is why the date is printed at the top of the page and why this lesson is on a 30-day review interval. See our editorial policy for how that works.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest paid Copilot plan? Copilot Pro at $10 USD per month. Verified students, verified teachers and maintainers of popular open source projects may get equivalent access free.

What is the difference between Copilot Pro and Pro+? Pro+ costs $39 rather than $10, includes 7,000 total AI credits rather than 1,500, adds access to premium models, and includes audit logs.

Do I need Business or is Pro enough for my team? If “team” means several people who each want Copilot, individual plans work. If it means you need to control what Copilot can see, enforce conventions across repositories, or produce an audit trail, you need Business.

What happens when I run out of AI credits? You can upgrade your plan, or set an Additional usage budget to purchase more credits. Exceeding the allowed additional usage requires settling what you have already consumed before continuing.

Is Copilot available for GitHub Enterprise Server? No. GitHub’s documentation states Copilot is not currently available for GitHub Enterprise Server.

Can I switch plans later? Yes. Individual plans are month-to-month subscriptions, and organisation seats are granted and revoked by administrators.

Next steps

Chosen a plan? How to Install GitHub Copilot covers setup for every supported environment, or go straight to How to Get Started for the end-to-end tutorial.

If you are still deciding, Cloud Agent vs Agent Mode explains what the cloud agent actually does — the capability that separates Copilot Free from everything else.