GitHub Copilot: GitHub's AI coding assistant, plans and limits

What Copilot does day to day

GitHub Copilot started as autocomplete: as you type, it suggests the rest of the line or function. It has since grown into a full AI assistant for code, with three main uses:

• completions in your editor, which don’t consume credits on paid plans;
• chat, to ask in plain English for an explanation, a test or a fix;
• agents, which take on a task (fix an issue, modernize an app) and come back with a proposed change for you to review. This is known as agentic coding.

Copilot plugs into most development environments and into GitHub.com, so you don’t have to juggle a chat window and your project.

Pricing and credits as of October 22, 2026

GitHub lists a free plan plus three paid tiers for individuals: Pro at $10 per month, Pro+ at $39 and Max at $100. For organizations, Copilot Business costs $19 and Copilot Enterprise $39 per seat per month. Verified students get a free Copilot Student plan, and verified teachers and maintainers of popular open source projects may qualify for free Copilot Pro, according to GitHub’s criteria.

Paid plans run on “AI credits”: chat and agents use them, completions don’t. Once your allowance is gone, you can set a budget to keep going, switch to a lighter model or wait for the monthly reset. In practice, heavy agent use can cost more than the sticker price, so keep an eye on usage in your settings.

Privacy: one setting worth checking

This matters for personal accounts: since April 24, 2026, GitHub uses interaction data (code you send, suggestions you accept, repository context) from Free, Pro and Pro+ plans to train its models by default, unless you opt out in your Copilot settings. If you work on confidential code with a personal account, change that setting on day one. Business and Enterprise plans are not affected. For the broader picture, see our page on GDPR and AI.

Limits and risks

Copilot can produce code that compiles but hides bugs, security holes or poor dependency choices. Like any hallucination, a plausible suggestion is not a verified one: review and test what agents propose before merging. English is the best-supported language; GitHub notes that pull request summaries and commit messages are English-only. If you’re weighing an AI-first editor against an assistant that slots into your existing tools, compare it with Cursor or use our AI assistants comparison.

Official reference: GitHub Copilot plans and pricing.