GitHub Copilot seats go prepaid as signups reopen Sept 1

GitHub Copilot Business and Enterprise signups reopen today for customers paying by credit card or PayPal, after more than four months closed. The seats come back with a string attached: you pay for each seat before the developer can use it. If you have been waiting since April to put your team on Copilot, the door is open — and the billing model on the other side of it is not the one you remember.

What actually happened

GitHub paused new self-serve signups for Copilot Business on April 22, 2026, for organizations on GitHub Free and GitHub Team. The stated reason was to "ensure a reliable and sustainable Copilot experience for all users." Existing customers kept working. Everyone else waited.

The August 28 changelog sets out the terms of the reopening:

• September 1, 2026: GitHub starts reenabling signups for new Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers paying by credit card or PayPal. Account vetting is being strengthened at the same time.
• Every new seat assignment requires payment for that seat before the user gets Copilot access. No assign-now-reconcile-later.
• October 1, 2026: the same rule reaches existing Copilot Business and Enterprise customers on credit card or PayPal. At the start of your next billing cycle, every assigned seat incurs an upfront charge.
• September 28, 2026: separately, Copilot Chat experiences get unified and code review flips its default effort level from Lite to Balanced.

Enterprise agreements billed through Microsoft are not what this changelog is about. This is the self-serve card-on-file path — which is exactly how most small teams buy.

Why prepaid seats matter for your business

The cash-flow change is small. The operational change is not.

Idle seats now cost you on day one. The old rhythm — assign a seat during onboarding, sort out the invoice later, reclaim it when someone leaves — used to be free to be sloppy about. Now every assignment is a charge before anyone writes a line of code. If your offboarding checklist does not include "unassign Copilot," it is now a line item.

October 1 is the date to put in your calendar, not September 1. Existing customers are the ones getting a surprise. Your next billing cycle after October 1 charges upfront for every seat currently assigned — including the three belonging to contractors who finished in June.

A vendor that can close the front door can change the terms behind it. GitHub shut off self-serve signups for four months because demand outran what it wanted to serve, then reopened with stricter vetting and prepayment. That is a rational thing for a vendor to do. It is also a reminder that your AI coding tooling sits on someone else's capacity plan. The portable part of your setup is your prompts, your custom instructions, and anything running over MCP — not the seat.

Audit your assigned seats this week, before the October cycle does it for you.

Sources: GitHub Changelog: Upcoming changes to GitHub Copilot policies and billing, GitHub Changelog: Pausing new self-serve signups for GitHub Copilot Business.