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, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

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

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 Throttle: 403
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
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
GITHUB_TOKEN inside a GitHub Actions workflow per-repository
requests_per_hour · hour
1000
Search endpoints per-user
requests_per_minute · minute
30
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

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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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