In this article, Rob Bos details the upcoming enforcement of GitHub Copilot Premium Requests. He explains how pricing will work, what actions incur costs, and walks users through tools and strategies to monitor and control their Copilot spending.

GitHub Copilot Premium Requests

Author: Rob Bos
Posted: 17 Jun 2025

GitHub is introducing a major update regarding the billing structure for Copilot users: Premium Requests will now be enforced, meaning you’ll need to consider the cost of the AI-powered actions you take. This change makes users more aware of resource consumption and monetary responsibility, ending a period of “free” access to significant generative AI computing.

What are Premium Requests?

Starting June 18th, requests sent to models in GitHub Copilot other than the default GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 will count as “Premium Requests.” You’ll find official documentation here: GitHub Premium Requests docs.

Screenshot of the different multipliers per model

Each request against these non-default models has a defined ‘multiplier’ cost:

  • Standard requests (e.g., Chat with non-default model) = 1 premium request per turn (each question/answer)
  • Using high-end models (like GPT-4.5) can incur up to 50x the premium request cost
  • Cheaper models (like Gemini 2.0 Flash) incur lower multipliers (0.25x)

For a video overview, see: Premium Requests Video

What Types of Actions Trigger Premium Requests?

Main features that consume Premium Requests:

  • Chatting with a non-default model: 1 premium request per turn
  • Each step in the Coding Agent: 1 per step (multiple steps possible per conversation)
  • Code Review in a Pull Request: 1 premium request
  • Agent Mode in editor: 1 premium request per user-initiated action
  • Copilot Coding Agent: arbitrarily uses premium requests per needs
  • Copilot Spaces and Extensions: Also consume premium requests, but the exact count can vary (unclear if it’s split between local and remote extensions).

You can find specifics about these actions here.

Plans and Their Limits

Plan Premium requests per month Copilot Chat in IDEs Code completion
Copilot Free 50 50 messages 2000 completions
Copilot Pro 300 Unlimited (base model) Unlimited
Copilot Pro+ 1500 Unlimited (base model) Unlimited
Copilot Business 300 per user Unlimited (base model) Unlimited
Copilot Enterprise 1000 per user Unlimited (base model) Unlimited
  • Exceeding limits: After exceeding your monthly allotment, excess usage costs .04 per premium request; e.g., using a model with a 50x multiplier would cost $2.00 per request.
  • Free plans: Even using Chat on the base model counts as a premium request.

For a comprehensive list and more detail, see: Premium Requests multipliers

Controlling Your Expenditure

To safeguard against overspending, GitHub allows you to set a monthly budget for premium requests in your user or organization settings. By default, this is set to .00, blocking additional requests once the budget is hit. You can adjust it to your preference.

This budget setting is now surfaced within the new Coding Agent session panel as well: Coding Agent consumption example

Monitoring Your Usage

Editors such as Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, and Visual Studio now show model multipliers and Copilot usage progress bars so you can track consumption in real time:

  • Model multipliers: Multipliers per model
  • Account overview in VS Code: Account setup screenshot
  • Premium request usage in Visual Studio: Visual Studio usage screenshot

To view your detailed Copilot and Premium Request consumption:

Analyzing Usage as an Organization

For companies and large organizations:

  • Download a CSV export of Copilot usage from Billing and Licenses → Usage in your GitHub Enterprise settings.
  • Use the GitHub Copilot Premium Requests Usage Analyzer, a single-page app (open source, built with GitHub Spark and Copilot Coding Agent), to visualize this data.

Screenshots of the analyzer in action: Top bar information Usage statistics over time Model usage in bars

Try the analyzer: https://github.com/devops-actions/github-copilot-premium-reqs-usage

Feel free to contribute or suggest features to improve this analysis.

For more info and the latest updates, check the original publications and links provided throughout the guide.

This post appeared first on “Rob Bos’ Blog”. Read the entire article here