Getting GitHub Copilot Pro for free

Who gets Pro for $0

The free tier that ships with any GitHub account — 2,000 completions a month, entry-level models, no card — is the floor, not the ceiling. Above it, GitHub offers the paid Pro features at no cost to three specific groups: verified students, through a dedicated Copilot Student plan; verified teachers; and maintainers of popular open-source projects. The third one is the least obvious, because it is not a student benefit at all: if you have write or admin access to a widely used public repository, GitHub evaluates the project's popularity and contribution metrics and can extend the full Pro tier to you at $0. That is the long-tail case this whole note exists to surface.

What the free grant actually covers

The grant is the Pro tier, not a weaker clone of it. That means unlimited code completions and next-edit suggestions rather than the 2,000 monthly cap, 1,500 AI credits a month, access to the mid-complexity model set, and the third-party coding agents. It is the same feature row a paying subscriber gets at $10 a month, just billed to the program instead of a card. For a student training in an editor all day, that is a clean and legitimate saving; it is not a two-week trial that quietly expires.

How to claim it

The path is short and the first step is not the checkout. Sign in with the GitHub account that carries your student, teacher, or maintainer status, open your Copilot settings, and use the eligibility link for your category. If the button reads free, you are verified and can activate immediately. If it shows a price, the account is not currently recognised as eligible, and the fix is to complete the verification for that category rather than to hunt for a discount. The two are different problems, and people usually attempt the second one first.

The two things that trip people up

The first is that the grant is tied to a verified account and is rechecked on a schedule: it is a standing benefit that renews while you remain eligible, not a one-time credit you bank forever, so the status can change under you. The second is that it does not stack with a paid seat: if you already have a paid Pro subscription or an active trial on the same account, you have to cancel it before the free eligibility can apply. Both of these are small, and both are the reason the offer stays underused — it disappears the moment someone treats it as a coupon instead of an account state.

The eligibility routes and the Pro feature set were read from GitHub's official plans page and documentation as of October 2026; the credit allowance and model access in Pro can change without a version bump, so confirm the current numbers on the plans page before relying on them.