Cost centers allow you to attribute usage and spending to business units, improving accountability, forecasting, and cost allocation. You can also apply one or more budgets to them to control costs.
Cost center creation
- Enterprise owners and billing managers can create and edit cost centers for any resource.
- Organization owners can create and edit cost centers that contain resources in their organization.
When you create a cost center, you define which resources it contains from users, repositories, and organizations. If your account is billed through Azure, you can also add an Azure subscription to bill usage to a different Azure subscription than the enterprise default.
To get started with cost centers, see Using cost centers to allocate costs to business units.
Cost center allocation
To allocate metered spending to a cost center, you add repositories, organizations, or users to the cost center.
- For usage-based products, like GitHub Actions, cost centers are charged based on the repositories or organizations in the cost center, as this is where the usage takes place.
- For license-based products, like GitHub Copilot, cost centers are charged based on the users in the cost center.
- For products billed by premium request usage, like Copilot coding agent, cost centers are also charged based on the users in the cost center.
Cost centers only apply to metered usage, and do not work with volume or subscription billing.
For more details, see Cost center allocation for different products.
Cost center limitations
- The maximum number of active cost centers per enterprise is 250.
- The maximum number of resources per cost center is 10,000.
- A maximum of 50 resources can be added to or removed from a cost center at a time.
- Azure subscriptions can only be added to or removed from cost centers through the UI.