I recently received an email titled ” Copilot billing changes are effective today” That was on June 18th, 2025.
It stated the following:
Starting today, premium request limits are enforced for GitHub Copilot.
Copilot premium request limits are now in effect.Your premium request counter has been re-set to zero as of today, giving you a fresh start. Regular monthly resets will occur on the 1st of each month going forward.
For more information and details, please see here.
– The GitHub Team
If you received an email with the above information from GitHub regarding Copilot and your billing charges? Then this blog is for you.
GitHub described a premium request as such:
Some Copilot features use more advanced processing power and count as premium requests.
I found myself a bit disappointed as I was looking for a much netter explanation of what a premium request is and what makes a request a premium request. That description alone did not specify which is a premium request and which is not. I needed to dig deeper. I did two things. I kept reading while at the same time exploring what this means with Microsoft Copilot.
I asked or shall I saw “prompted” Microsoft Copilot. I made sure to select the option to have Microsoft Copilot “think deeper”. It pointed out that premium requests are generally a function of model, complexity of the ask, and the compute power it required on the backend to generate the response. It responded with …
a premium request in GitHub Copilot is any interaction that leverages advanced AI models or feature sets that go beyond the standard, included functionality.
Essentially when …
you use features that utilize more advanced or specialized AI models rather than the default ones (like GPT‑4o or GPT‑4.1), these interactions are classified as premium requests.
Additional information in the docs described what is included with your Copilot paid and free plans.
GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o are the included models, and do not consume any premium requests if you are on a paid plan. If you use Copilot Free, you have access to a limited number of models, and each model will consume one premium request when used.
Read more about this change using the references below from GitHub own docs where they provide additional context, offer recommendations and guidance.
Resources
Understand your Copilot requests
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/understanding-and-managing-copilot-usage/understanding-and-managing-requests-in-copilot
Make sure to choose the right AI model for your task
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/ai-models/choosing-the-right-ai-model-for-your-task
Monitor your usage
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/understanding-and-managing-copilot-usage/monitoring-your-copilot-usage-and-entitlements
Use budgets to limit your spend
https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-your-billing/using-budgets-control-spending#managing-budgets-for-your-personal-account
Johnny Harbieh 