GPT-5.4 mini: pricing, context and performance

What you need to know

OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini on March 17, 2026. It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money. Its weights are not published, so it only runs remotely, through the OpenAI API or partner hosts (42 listed on models.dev). That makes it 7 months old as of October 22, 2026.

We file it under mid-range models (34 models in this category on the site).

What do independent benchmarks say?

According to results published by Epoch AI (checked on October 22, 2026), GPT-5.4 mini has a capability index of 68.4 out of 100, computed on 4 benchmarks from our basket.

It is not among the top 30 of the weekly ranking.

• GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science questions): 86.9% — the best tracked model, Gemini 4 Argon, reaches 96.4%
• OTIS Mock AIME (competition mathematics problems): 88.9% — the best tracked model, GPT-5.5 Pro, reaches 100%
• FrontierMath (very hard research-level mathematics): 51.2% — the best tracked model, GPT-6 Astra, reaches 93.7%
• FrontierCode (advanced programming tasks): 27% — the best tracked model, Claude Opus 5.5, reaches 54.6%

Context and capabilities

Its context window reaches 400,000 tokens, roughly 600 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough for a long report or several contracts at once. A single answer can run to 128,000 tokens.

It accepts as input: text and image. Its knowledge stops at August 31, 2025: beyond that, it needs web search or your documents.

It can call tools (functions, APIs) and return structured JSON output, which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

Pricing and budget

GPT-5.4 mini costs $0.75 per million input tokens and $4.5 per million output tokens (median of 42 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

In practice, an agent task that reads 20,000 tokens and writes 2,000 costs about $0.024, or $24 for 1,000 such tasks.

That is in line with mid-range models, whose median output price is $4.38.

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

What is it good for?

Given its category, GPT-5.4 mini is mainly aimed at a balance between quality and cost, for everyday uses that do not justify a frontier model.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

What could replace it?

In the same category, the models closest to GPT-5.4 mini are:

• Qwen3.6 Plus (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 69)
• Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic, index 67.6)
• Gemini 3.6 Flash (Google DeepMind, index 73.1)
• Claude Opus 4.5 (Anthropic, index 74.3)