What is GitHub Copilot Premium Requests

Tomorrow the 18th is the date GitHub Copilot Premium Requests will be enforced (see the docs here).

This post gives you an overview to know what you need to expect. Copilot Premium Requests are any request that is made to any model that is not the default (currently GPT-4o and GPT-4.1). Some features against a model will cost 1 Premium Request, some will cost more then 1 Premium Request (using GPT-4.5 will be x50!) and some are less expensive (Gemini 2.0 Flash is the cheapest at 0.25x).

I previously recorded a video on Premium Requests as well, find it here if you prefer to learn things that way:

What is a premium request

Here is an overview of the main features that will consume a premium request:

• Chatting with a non default model: 1 premium request per ‘turn’ (every question and answer is a turn)
• Every step in the Coding Agent: 1 premium request. The agent can decide to make multiple steps, and will thus consume a premium request for each step. Note: I hope that the agent will also come with a “max requests” setting, so that you can limit the amount of requests it can make in a single conversation and prevent it from overspending.
• Requesting a Code Review in a Pull Request: 1 premium request
• Agent Mode in an editor: 1 premium request per user initiated request

Free plan

If you are on a Free plan, even the base model will consume a premium request if you are using the Chat feature.

Paid plans

If you are on a paid plan, then you will get a certain amount of premium requests per month. If you go over this amount, you will be charged for the extra requests at $0.04 per premium request. If that request is against a 50x model, then you will be charged $2.00 for that single request! To view the full overview of the different multipliers, see the documentation.

This is the table of the different amount of included premium requests per plan:

To protect yourself or your users, you can configure a budget for premium requests in your user/organization settings.

Analyzing the GitHub Copilot Premium Requests report in your organization / enterprise

Do you need to analyze the GitHub Copilot Premium requests CSV now that they will be enforced? I created a single page application (SPA) with GitHub Spark and GitHub Copilot Coding Agent to display an overview of the Premium Requests CSV that you can currently download (no API yet 😓).

• Can be hosted on GitHub Pages: GitHub Copilot Premium Requests Usage Analyzer
• Upload the CSV from the enterprise export (Billing and Licenses –> Usage –> Export dropdown right top) Result can be seen here:

See the repo in action here (click on the link on the right side to use your own data): https://github.com/devops-actions/github-copilot-premium-reqs-usage. It’s open source, so feel free to contribute or request features!