GitHub Copilot UK pricing has shifted under British developers’ feet this year, because from 1 June 2026 GitHub retired its old flat premium-request model and moved every paid plan onto usage-based AI Credits. The headline figures, published on GitHub’s official plans page, still read in US dollars: Copilot Pro at $10 a month, Pro+ at $39, the new Max tier at $100, Copilot Business at $19 per seat and Copilot Enterprise at $39 per seat. GitHub does not publish a separate sterling list price, so this guide converts each figure honestly, adds the UK VAT context that British buyers actually pay, and explains who each tier really suits.
- GitHub lists Copilot in USD: Free ($0), Pro ($10/mo), Pro+ ($39/mo), Max ($100/mo), Business ($19/seat/mo) and Enterprise ($39/seat/mo), per GitHub’s plans page.
- From 1 June 2026 every paid plan includes a monthly pool of AI Credits, where 1 AI Credit equals $0.01 USD, confirmed in GitHub’s billing reference.
- Code completions and Next Edit Suggestions stay unlimited and free of credit use on all paid plans; chat, agents and code review draw down credits.
- Why it matters to UK readers: GitHub bills in dollars and UK consumers pay 20% VAT on top, so your real monthly cost is the card’s exchange rate plus tax, not the sticker price.
What changed on 1 June 2026 and why it matters
The biggest story behind GitHub Copilot UK pricing in 2026 is not a number on the tin, it is the billing engine underneath. Until this summer, paid plans bundled a fixed monthly quota of “premium requests” and charged a flat overage per request beyond it. As GitHub explained in its announcement that Copilot is moving to usage-based billing, that model retired on 1 June 2026. Each paid plan now ships with an included pool of AI Credits, and anything you use beyond that pool is metered by the tokens your chosen model actually consumes.
In practice this rewards light users and penalises heavy agent runs on expensive models. The same announcement confirms that code completions and Next Edit Suggestions remain included and do not draw on credits, so anyone using Copilot purely as autocomplete in their editor sees no change at all. It is the chat windows, the cloud coding agent, multi-file edits and Copilot code review that now spend credits, and a long agentic session on a premium model such as Claude Opus can eat through an allowance far faster than a day of inline suggestions. Monthly subscribers were migrated automatically on 1 June; annual subscribers keep the old premium-request pricing until their term ends. If you are weighing up whether any of this is worth paying for at all, our look at whether you actually need a paid AI subscription in 2026 is a useful gut check before you reach for a card.
Copilot Free: what you get for nothing
The free tier is the sensible starting point for most individual UK developers, and it costs precisely £0 because $0 converts cleanly and carries no VAT. GitHub’s plans page lists Copilot Free as 2,000 code completions per month plus 50 chat requests, with access to a rotating selection of models including Anthropic’s Haiku 4.5 and a GPT-5 mini variant, along with the Copilot command-line interface. There is no monthly credit pool on Free, so once you hit the completion or chat caps you wait for the calendar to reset or you upgrade.
For a hobbyist, a student between term-time projects, or a professional who only occasionally wants a second opinion on a tricky function, 2,000 completions is more generous than it sounds because inline autocomplete is the feature you lean on most. Where Free runs thin is sustained agentic work: 50 chat requests disappear quickly if you treat Copilot as a pair-programmer rather than an autocomplete. Verified teachers and maintainers of popular open-source projects can get Copilot Pro at no charge through GitHub’s education and maintainer programmes, which is worth checking before you pay, and the broader question of which assistant earns a place in your workflow is something we weigh in our guide to choosing between Claude, Copilot or Gemini for UK work.
Copilot Pro and Pro+: the individual paid tiers in pounds
Copilot Pro is listed at $10 per month and Pro+ at $39 per month on GitHub’s plans page. At a representative mid-2026 rate of roughly £1 to $1.27, $10 lands near £7.90 and $39 near £30.70 before tax. Because GitHub treats a UK consumer subscription as a business-to-consumer digital service, UK VAT at the standard 20% rate published by gov.uk applies on top, so a realistic all-in figure is in the region of £9.50 for Pro and £36.80 for Pro+ each month, with the exact pence depending on your card’s exchange rate on the billing date.
What you are buying differs more than the price gap suggests. Pro includes unlimited completions, the Copilot cloud agent, and a monthly AI Credit allowance that GitHub’s plans page frames as $15 of total credits. Pro+ steps that up to $70 of monthly credits, audit-style usage visibility, and access to premium models such as Claude Opus 4.7 and 4.8 that Pro does not unlock. If your day is mostly autocomplete with occasional chat, Pro is ample. If you live in the agent, run long multi-file refactors, and want the strongest reasoning models on tap, Pro+ buys both the headroom and the model access. Developers who also pay for a standalone coding tool should read our coverage of how Claude Code reached a billion dollars, because the credit maths there rhymes with Copilot’s new meter.
Copilot Max: the new $100 individual tier
New for 2026 is Copilot Max, listed at $100 per month, which slots above Pro+ as the heaviest individual plan. GitHub’s plans page describes Max as carrying $200 of monthly total credits, priority access to new models, and the highest individual allowance of AI usage. Converted at the same indicative rate, $100 is roughly £78.70 before tax, and with 20% VAT the all-in figure sits near £94 a month for a UK card holder.
That is a serious sum for an individual subscription, and it only makes sense for a specific profile: a solo developer or founder who runs agentic workflows all day on premium models and would otherwise blow past Pro+ credits and pay overage at $0.01 per credit anyway. The logic is the same as any metered service, where a larger bundle is cheaper per unit than buying overage piecemeal, so Max is best read as a volume discount for power users rather than a feature unlock. For most people, including most professional UK developers, Pro+ at $39 covers the premium models and a $70 credit pool, and stepping up to Max is only worth it once your real monthly token spend consistently exceeds what Pro+ includes. Tracking that spend matters, which is why GitHub now surfaces credit usage in the billing dashboard, and why the cost discipline we discuss in our Microsoft Copilot versus Google Gemini comparison for UK small business applies just as well to individual seats.
Copilot Business and Enterprise: pricing for UK teams
For organisations, GitHub lists Copilot Business at $19 per granted seat per month and Copilot Enterprise at $39 per granted seat per month, with both figures confirmed in the GitHub Copilot licenses documentation. Converted at the indicative mid-2026 rate, $19 is about £15 and $39 about £30.70 per seat before tax. UK VAT treatment for business customers is different from consumer billing: a UK VAT-registered company that supplies a valid VAT number can usually account for the tax under the reverse-charge mechanism rather than paying it to GitHub, which is a meaningful cash-flow point for any team buying more than a handful of seats.
The seat tiers buy more than a bigger credit pool. Business adds centralised seat management, organisation-wide policy controls, a broad model catalogue and a shared monthly AI Credit allowance per seat. Enterprise layers on a larger credit pool per seat, priority access to new models and features, and the deeper integration that large engineering organisations expect. The licensing model is per granted seat, so you pay for who you assign rather than who happens to type, and unused seats can be reclaimed. Teams sizing a rollout should also weigh governance and supply-chain risk, not just headline cost: our report on how a GitHub VS Code extension breach exposed thousands of internal repositories is a reminder that tooling decisions carry security weight alongside the per-seat sum.
How AI Credits actually work and what they cost
The mechanic that now governs your bill is the AI Credit, and GitHub’s models and pricing reference states plainly that 1 AI Credit equals $0.01 USD. Every paid plan includes a monthly pool of these credits: $15 of credits on Pro, $70 on Pro+, $200 on Max, with the per-seat business plans carrying their own allowances. When you use a feature that consumes credits, GitHub adds up the input tokens, output tokens and cached tokens for your chosen model, applies that model’s published per-million-token rate, and converts the total into credits drawn from your pool.
Model choice is therefore the lever that decides how far an allowance stretches. GitHub’s reference lists premium models such as Claude Opus 4.5 at $5.00 per million input tokens and $25.00 per million output tokens, so a heavy agent run on Opus burns credits far faster than the same work on a cheaper model. Crucially, code completions and Next Edit Suggestions sit outside this meter entirely and stay unlimited on every paid plan, so the credit pool is really a budget for chat, agents, the CLI and code review rather than everyday autocomplete. Once you exhaust the included pool, additional usage is billed at the same $0.01 per credit, which is where the overage on a busy month appears. If you want a plain-English sense of how these meters compare across assistants, our Gemini UK pricing breakdown walks through a similar tier structure in GBP terms.
GitHub Copilot UK pricing compared across every plan
The table below puts every tier side by side, with the published USD price, an indicative GBP conversion at roughly £1 to $1.27, a rough VAT-inclusive consumer estimate where it applies, and the included credit pool. Treat the GBP figures as guidance only: GitHub bills in dollars, your card’s exchange rate moves daily, and the exact tax you pay depends on whether you buy as a consumer or a VAT-registered business. The published USD price is the only fixed number.
| Plan | USD price (published) | Indicative GBP (ex VAT) | Est. consumer all-in (inc 20% VAT) | Included AI Credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | £0 | £0 | None |
| Pro | $10/mo | ~£7.90 | ~£9.50 | $15 |
| Pro+ | $39/mo | ~£30.70 | ~£36.80 | $70 |
| Max | $100/mo | ~£78.70 | ~£94 | $200 |
| Business | $19/seat/mo | ~£15 | Reverse charge for VAT-registered firms | Per-seat pool |
| Enterprise | $39/seat/mo | ~£30.70 | Reverse charge for VAT-registered firms | Larger per-seat pool |
The pattern is clear once you see it laid out: the jump from Free to Pro is small and easy to justify for anyone using Copilot daily, the jump from Pro to Pro+ is really about premium-model access and a four-times-larger credit pool, and Max only earns its keep for sustained heavy agentic use. On the team side, Business is the default and Enterprise is for organisations that need the larger credit pool and priority model access. None of these numbers should be confused with Microsoft 365 Copilot, the separate Office productivity assistant, whose UK pricing we cover in our guide to the free Copilot versus Copilot Pro versus Microsoft 365 Copilot split.
Where to sign up and manage GitHub Copilot in the UK
There is no UK reseller to shop around: GitHub Copilot is sold directly by GitHub and billed to your GitHub account, so the only place to start, change or cancel a plan is on GitHub itself. Individual plans are activated and downgraded from the official Copilot plans page (last checked: 2026-06-07), where the $0 Free, $10 Pro, $39 Pro+ and $100 Max tiers are listed. Organisation owners assign and reclaim Business and Enterprise seats from the GitHub organisation settings rather than the consumer plans page.
For the detail that decides your actual bill, the GitHub Docs plans overview sets out which models and features each tier unlocks, and the billing reference explains how credits are metered. UK buyers should add their billing address and, if buying for a VAT-registered business, their VAT number, so the reverse charge is applied correctly rather than paying tax you can reclaim. Verified teachers and open-source maintainers should claim free Pro through GitHub’s education and maintainer programmes before paying. If you would rather not commit, the Free tier needs no card at all, which makes it the cleanest way to try Copilot before deciding whether Pro, Pro+ or a team plan is worth your money.
GitHub Copilot pricing in the UK: frequently asked questions
Does GitHub publish a separate UK price in pounds?
No. GitHub lists Copilot prices in US dollars on its plans page and bills your card in dollars, so there is no official sterling list price. Your real cost is the dollar figure converted at your card provider’s exchange rate on the billing date, plus UK VAT at 20% for consumer subscriptions. The GBP figures in this guide are indicative conversions, not prices GitHub has published, which is why we label them as estimates rather than quoting them as fact.
Is VAT added to GitHub Copilot in the UK?
For UK consumers, yes: standard-rate VAT of 20% applies to digital services like Copilot, so expect roughly a fifth on top of the converted dollar price. For a UK VAT-registered business that provides a valid VAT number, the reverse-charge mechanism usually applies, meaning your company accounts for the VAT itself rather than paying it to GitHub. Always enter your billing country and VAT number correctly at sign-up so the tax is handled properly and you are not charged tax you could otherwise reclaim.
What are AI Credits and how much is one worth?
AI Credits are GitHub’s new unit of metered Copilot usage, introduced for all paid plans on 1 June 2026. One AI Credit equals $0.01 USD, per GitHub’s billing reference. Each paid plan includes a monthly pool of credits, and features such as chat, agents, the CLI and code review draw them down based on the tokens your chosen model uses. Code completions and Next Edit Suggestions stay unlimited and do not consume credits, so the pool is effectively a budget for everything beyond inline autocomplete.
Is the free GitHub Copilot plan enough for most developers?
For many individual developers, yes. Copilot Free gives 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests a month with no card required, which comfortably covers occasional autocomplete and the odd question. It runs short if you rely on chat heavily or want sustained agentic work, since 50 chat requests disappear quickly and there is no credit pool. If you find yourself hitting those caps every month, Pro at $10 is the natural next step rather than staying frustrated on Free.
What is the difference between Copilot Pro and Pro+?
Pro at $10 a month includes unlimited completions, the cloud agent and a $15 monthly credit pool. Pro+ at $39 a month adds a much larger $70 credit pool, audit-style usage visibility, and access to premium models such as Claude Opus that Pro does not unlock. The choice comes down to how much chat and agent work you do and whether you need the strongest reasoning models. Light, autocomplete-led users are well served by Pro; heavy agent users who want premium models should pay for Pro+.
How is GitHub Copilot Business different from buying individual Pro seats?
Copilot Business at $19 per seat is built for organisations, adding centralised seat management, organisation-wide policy controls and a shared model catalogue that individual Pro plans do not provide. It is licensed per granted seat, so you assign and reclaim access centrally, and VAT-registered UK firms can apply the reverse charge. Individual Pro seats are cheaper per head but lack the admin, policy and governance controls a team needs, so for anything beyond a couple of developers Business is usually the cleaner choice.
What happened to the old premium request pricing?
It retired on 1 June 2026 when GitHub moved every paid plan to usage-based AI Credits. Monthly subscribers were migrated automatically on that date. Annual subscribers keep the old premium-request model until their term expires, then transition to the new credit system. The practical effect is that your bill now reflects the tokens you actually consume on chat, agents and code review, rather than a fixed quota of premium requests with a flat overage rate.
Can I get GitHub Copilot for free as a student or open-source maintainer?
Yes. GitHub offers Copilot Pro at no charge to verified teachers and to maintainers of popular open-source projects through its education and maintainer programmes. You will need to verify your status through GitHub, and approval is not automatic, but for eligible users it means full Pro features without the $10 monthly fee. It is worth checking your eligibility before paying, because the saving is the entire Pro subscription rather than a discount.
Our verdict: which Copilot plan to buy
For most individual UK developers, we would start on Copilot Free, then move to Pro at $10 a month, roughly £9.50 all-in once conversion and VAT are counted, the moment you find yourself rationing chat requests. That is the plan with the best value-to-cost ratio, and the new credit pool comfortably covers everyday work that is not pure autocomplete. Pro+ is the right call only if you genuinely need premium models like Claude Opus or run enough agentic work to exhaust Pro’s allowance, and Max at $100 is a power-user volume play we would not recommend until your tracked credit spend proves it. For teams, Business at $19 per seat is the sensible default, with Enterprise reserved for larger organisations that need the bigger credit pool and priority model access. This is a value and structure assessment based on GitHub’s published pricing and our reading of the new billing model, not hands-on lab metering of token spend. The one thing that would change our advice is the exchange rate: because GitHub bills in dollars, a sharp move in the pound could shift every all-in figure here, so check the live rate before you commit.
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