GitHub Actions · Rate Limits

Github Actions Rate Limits

Published GitHub REST API rate limits, which the Actions endpoints inherit, read from GitHub's documentation and CONFIRMED against a live unauthenticated response from https://api.github.com/rate_limit on 2026-09-17 (x-ratelimit-limit: 60, x-ratelimit-resource: core). REPLACES A SCAFFOLD: until this round this file carried invented tiers — "free 10 requests/minute, 1,000/month", "professional 100/minute" — that GitHub has never published. GitHub's limits are per HOUR and keyed on the AUTHENTICATION METHOD, not on a purchased plan tier, which is a materially different model from the one the scaffold described.

Github Actions Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for GitHub Actions on the APIs.io network, in the API Commons Rate Limits shape.

It captures 9 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests_per_hour and requests_per_minute.

Limit state is signalled in the limit, remaining, used, and reset response headers, and an exhausted limit returns HTTP 403.

The profile also includes 4 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled, throttledAlternate, and note.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Quotas, and Throttling.

9 Limits Exhausted: HTTP 403 limitremainingusedreset
Read from the provider's live responses on 2026-09-17 — ['docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/rate-limits-....
View Source
Rate LimitingQuotasThrottling

Limits

Unauthenticated requests per-ip
requests_per_hour · hour
60
Authenticated user (personal access token / OAuth user token) per-user
requests_per_hour · hour
5000
Shared across the user's PATs and any app acting on their behalf.
GitHub App or OAuth app owned by a GitHub Enterprise Cloud organization per-user
requests_per_hour · hour
15000
GitHub App installation access token per-installation
requests_per_hour · hour
5000
Scales with size — +50 requests/hour for each repository beyond 20 and each user beyond 20, capped at 12,500/hour. 15,000/hour on GitHub Enterprise Cloud.
GITHUB_TOKEN inside a GitHub Actions workflow per-repository
requests_per_hour · hour
1000
15,000/hour per repository for resources belonging to a GitHub Enterprise Cloud account. This is the limit that actually binds an Actions workflow calling the API on itself, and it is the smallest of the authenticated limits.
Search endpoints per-user
requests_per_minute · minute
30
10/minute unauthenticated — confirmed live in the /rate_limit `search` resource on 2026-09-17. Not used by the Actions endpoints; recorded because it shares the same header surface and a client can be throttled on it.
Git LFS (unauthenticated) per-ip
requests_per_minute · minute
300
Git LFS (authenticated) per-user
requests_per_minute · minute
3000
OAuth access token requests per-app
requests_per_hour · hour
2000

Policies

Conditional requests
A request with If-None-Match (ETag) or If-Modified-Since that returns 304 Not Modified does NOT count against the primary rate limit. This is the single largest saving available to a polling agent and is documented, not inferred.
Backoff Strategy
Honour retry-after when present. Otherwise wait until x-ratelimit-reset. If neither is present, exponential backoff with jitter, and never retry more than once per minute against the same endpoint.
Prefer webhooks over polling
GitHub's own guidance: subscribe to workflow_run / workflow_job events rather than polling run status. See asyncapi/github-actions-webhooks.yml.
Getting a higher limit
There is no self-serve purchase of a higher REST rate limit. Higher limits come from the authentication method (a GitHub App installation) or from being on GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

Work with this as data

Every rate limit here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.

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Tools for rate limits

4 MCP tools reach this
  • find_rate_limitsBrowse and filter every rate limit in the catalog.
  • apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
  • resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
  • find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.
All 92 tools →

Call it yourself

curl for this page
This rate limit 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits/github-actions-rate-limits"
All rate limits 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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