To provide a strong, consistent Copilot experience, we’re making three separate, upcoming changes to Copilot policies and billing. Please review the upcoming updates to understand what may impact you.
Reopening Copilot Business and Enterprise signups with billing updates Starting September 1, 2026, GitHub will start reenabling sign-ups for new Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers paying by credit card or PayPal. To improve availability and reliability of Copilot services, we’re strengthening account vetting and updating billing experiences for customers who pay by credit card or PayPal.
- All new Copilot Business or Copilot Enterprise seat assignments will require payment for each seat before users gain Copilot access.
- At the start of the next billing cycle, all Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise seats assigned will incur an upfront charge. This will apply to existing Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers with a credit card or paypal payment method starting October 1, 2026.
- If you exceed your included usage, additional payment may be required for you and your users to continue using Copilot.
- Included usage may be prorated across the month to align with the seat cost proration.
- Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise prices are not changing. - Revoking a seat does not result in a prorated refund. The removal will be reflected in your next monthly billing cycle.
- All seats added in the middle of a billing cycle will continue to be prorated from date of assignment to end of bill cycle.
- Additional usage exceeding included allowances will remain available for purchase.
- Spend controls, usage tracking, and the option to purchase additional AI credits will remain available.
Existing Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers can expect these billing updates to take effect starting October 1, 2026.
Fully canceling Copilot and returning later may trigger updated account vetting and billing behaviors.
For more information, read our Copilot Quick Start documentation. Copilot cloud agent, Copilot Chat on github.com, and Copilot Chat in GitHub Mobile are converging to a single experience and policy
No earlier than September 28th, 2026, GitHub will relaunch Copilot Chat on github.com, Copilot Chat in GitHub Mobile, and GitHub Copilot cloud agent as a single, unified Copilot experience.
- The separate policies for these experiences will be replaced by a single policy.
- This unified Copilot experience will be enabled by default after launch.
- Cloud agent will leverage Sandbox to provide a faster cloud experience.
- Copilot on github.com will fully migrate to the agent sessions experience, previously used only by Copilot cloud agent. As a result, chat data will be retained for the life of the account instead of 28 days, aligning with our existing Copilot cloud agent experience.
Stay opted in No changes are required to keep Copilot available on github.com and GitHub Mobile. However, if you opt out of the unified experience, you or your teams will lose access to Copilot on github.com and GitHub Mobile after the new experience launches.
Business and enterprise administrators should review the policy before September 28th, 2026 and confirm that it reflects how they want to manage Copilot access for their teams.
To update the policy:
- Go to Copilot settings on github.com.
- Select Copilot cloud agent (coming soon). - Set the policy option.
Copilot code review default is changing to Balanced effort level Following the release of Copilot code review effort levels, the default review effort level for GitHub Copilot code review is changing from Lite to Balanced.
How review effort level defaults work You can set a default review effort level at the organization and repository levels:
- The organization default applies to all repositories owned by the organization that haven’t selected their own review effort level.
- The repository default applies to all automatically requested reviews within the repository. For manually requested reviews, you can select which effort level is used from the “Reviewers” bar in the pull request.
[Balanced is becoming the default effort level](#balanced-is-becoming-the-default-effort-level)
For existing and new repositories and organizations using Copilot code review, the review effort value of **Default** uses **Balanced** starting September 28th, 2026.
If you’d prefer to keep **Lite** as your default experience, change your review effort level away from **Default** and explicitly select **Lite** in your repository or organization settings before September 28th, 2026. We’ll respect that selection and won’t switch your default to **Balanced**.
Review the Copilot code review documentation to understand how this may affect your usage.