GPT-5.5: pricing, context and performance

GPT-5.5 at a glance

Released on April 23, 2026, GPT-5.5 is one of the 16 OpenAI models tracked on this site. It is a closed model: you access it through an API, from OpenAI or one of the 51 providers listed on models.dev. It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money. That makes it 6 months old as of October 22, 2026.

We file it under frontier models (24 models in this category on the site).

Benchmark results

According to results published by Epoch AI (checked on October 22, 2026), GPT-5.5 has a capability index of 89 out of 100, computed on 7 benchmarks from our basket.

That puts it at #10 in our weekly model ranking.

• GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science questions): 94% — the best tracked model, Gemini 4 Argon, reaches 96.4%
• OTIS Mock AIME (competition mathematics problems): 100% — the best tracked model, GPT-5.5 Pro, reaches 100%
• FrontierMath (very hard research-level mathematics): 85.3% — the best tracked model, GPT-6 Astra, reaches 93.7%
• SWE-bench Verified (fixing real software bugs): 80.6% — the best tracked model, Claude Opus 4.7, reaches 83.5%

Context and capabilities

Its context window reaches 1,050,000 tokens, roughly 1,575 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough to load a whole book or a mid-sized codebase. A single answer can run to 128,000 tokens.

It accepts as input: text, image and PDF. Its knowledge stops at December 1, 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.

What it costs

GPT-5.5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens (median of 51 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

To put it in perspective: reading 20,000 tokens (about thirty pages) and writing 2,000 costs roughly $0.16; a thousand of those tasks, $160.

That is 2.1 times the median output price of frontier models ($14.5).

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

Who is it for?

Given its category, GPT-5.5 is mainly aimed at hard tasks where quality matters more than cost: deep reasoning, complex code, long analyses.

Its SWE-bench Verified result (80.6%, above the median of tracked models) makes it a serious candidate for coding agents.

Its very large context window makes it worth considering for analysing large sets of documents in a single request.

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

Comparable models

In the same category, the models closest to GPT-5.5 are:

• GPT-6 Sol (OpenAI, index 89.2) — see the comparison
• Qwen3.8 Max 0902 (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 88.4) — see the comparison
• GPT-5.6 Sol (OpenAI, index 87.3)
• Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic, index 90.8) — see the comparison