GHE & Copilot Licences

In a nutshell

GitHub License & Service Procurement

Billing at the Enterprise level 📖 Docs

• 💳 The Enterprise account is the billing entity — a single invoice aggregates seats across all organizations in the enterprise.
• 📈 Copilot seats are billed from assignment, even if unused, with proration for mid-cycle additions. The same user is billed once across organizations within the same enterprise (see Multi-org & one bill below).
• 🧾 Two plans for organizations: Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise. Enterprise adds Chat in GitHub.com with repo-indexed knowledge, fine-tuned models, and audit logs on top of Business.
• 🏢 Standalone organizations (no enterprise) are billed directly to the org and can only use Business.

📘 Plan comparison: GitHub Copilot plans

License assignment at the Enterprise / Org level

• 🏷️ An org has exactly one Copilot plan — Business or Enterprise. You can’t mix tiers inside the same organization.
• 👥 Members of that org are eligible for a seat of that tier. Owners assign seats from Org Settings → Copilot → Access.
• 🆕 Enterprise-level assignment (Business only, GA 2025‑10‑28) — admins can now assign Copilot Business seats directly from the Enterprise settings. The license then follows the user across every org in the enterprise.
• 🔒 Users licensed by the enterprise, not through an org, skip “Let organizations decide”: those policies follow the separate Policies for enterprise-assigned users setting, so if it is disabled, those features are off for them. Copilot policies ↗

📰 Changelog: Managing Copilot Business in enterprise is now GA

Multi-org policy & one bill

When the same user belongs to multiple orgs in the same enterprise, two things matter:

• 💰 Only one license is billed for that user per cycle, even if several orgs assigned them a seat.
• ⚖️ Policies can conflict (e.g. one org disables Copilot Chat in the IDE, another enables it). GitHub resolves conflicts with a documented precedence:
  • Least restrictive wins for most features (Chat in IDE, agent mode, code review, cloud agent, web search…). If any org enables it, the user gets it everywhere.
  • Most restrictive wins for sensitive features — notably the Copilot Metrics API and suggestions matching public code. If any org disables it, the user is blocked everywhere.

📘 Full precedence matrix: Feature availability when GitHub Copilot policies conflict

Outside & guest collaborators

You can extend Copilot to people who aren’t members of your org — useful for vendors, contractors, and short-term partners.

Standard orgs — Outside collaborators

• 🎫 Just assign a seat — the dedicated Copilot toggle is gone; to give an outside collaborator Copilot, assign them a seat like any other member.
• 📦 Invite per repository — outside collaborators don’t see the rest of the org; they only get the repos you grant them.
• 🚫 To restrict them — Org → Settings → Member privileges → uncheck “Allow members to invite outside collaborators”.
• 💵 Each seated outside collaborator counts as 1 license on the enterprise invoice.

EMU enterprises — Guest collaborators

• 🪪 In Enterprise Managed Users (EMU), the equivalent role is Guest collaborator — provisioned by your IdP (Entra ID / Okta) just like regular EMU accounts.
• 🚧 Guest collaborators cannot access internal repositories by default; they only see the repos / orgs they are explicitly added to.
• 💵 A Guest collaborator with a Copilot seat is also billed as 1 license.

📘 Setup guides: Adding outside collaborators · Enabling guest collaborators (EMU)

GHE licence management 📖 Docs

For GitHub Enterprise Cloud, including EMU.