GitHub Copilot Premium Requests: Allowances, Multipliers, Billing, and What Replaced Them

GitHub Copilot premium requests are the metered unit that determined how much advanced Copilot usage your plan covered, and if you are searching for how they work in mid-2026, you need two answers, not one. First, the mechanics: a premium request is consumed each time you use an advanced Copilot feature, scaled by a per-model multiplier, against a fixed monthly allowance that came with your plan. Second, the news: as of June 1, 2026, GitHub moved Copilot from request-based billing to usage-based billing , and premium requests are now officially labeled "legacy" throughout GitHub's own documentation. Their replacement is GitHub AI Credits, metered at one cent per credit. Both systems matter today. Annual Copilot Pro and Pro+ subscribers who stayed on their existing plans are still billed in premium requests, and every question about the new credits model (allowances, overages, admin controls) is easier to answer if you understand the system it replaced. Here is the complete picture, with the numbers. What is a premium request? GitHub's definition is simple: a request is any interaction where you ask Copilot to do something, whether that is generating code, answering a question, or reviewing a pull request. Routine interactions, like inline code completions, are unlimited on every paid plan and never touch the meter. Premium requests are the interactions that use more advanced processing, and they draw down a monthly allowance: Copilot Chat : one premium request per user prompt, multiplied by the model's rate (ask, edit, agent, and plan modes all count). Copilot code review : each review consumed one request originally; since June 1, 2026 it carries a 13x multiplier , so a single review deducts 13 premium requests. Copilot coding agent and CLI : one premium request per prompt or session, times the model's rate. Only your prompts count; the autonomous tool calls Copilot makes along the way do not. Spark : a fixed rate of four premium requests per prompt. The critical n