GitHub Sponsors billing

Understand how sponsorship payments appear in your billing, how they align with your existing payment method and billing date, and what fees apply.

In this article

This article describes the billing model for GitHub Sponsors from the sponsor’s point of view.

You can sponsor anyone with a sponsored developer profile or sponsored organization profile on behalf of your personal account or an organization. You can select from a range of sponsorship tiers, whether for an individual profile or multiple profiles in bulk, and choose between one-time or monthly payment amounts and benefits, all determined by the sponsored account.

Your sponsorship will share your account’s existing billing date, payment method, and receipt.

What a sponsorship billing entry represents

A sponsorship is a monetary commitment you make to a sponsored developer or organization through GitHub. Each active recurring sponsorship produces a charge on its renewal date; one‑time sponsorships produce a single charge. For more information, see About GitHub Sponsors.

Unified payment method and billing date

Your sponsorships use the same stored payment method as your other paid products for the relevant personal account or organization. They follow the existing billing date/cycle for that account.

You can review active sponsorships alongside other paid subscriptions for the account to understand total ongoing commitments and historical charges.

If you sponsor from multiple accounts (personal vs organization), each account’s sponsorship charges stay separate and align with that account’s own billing cycle.

You must manage billing settings and paid features for each of your accounts separately.

You can switch between settings for your personal account, organization accounts, and enterprise accounts using the context switcher on each settings page. See Accessing the billing pages in the GitHub Enterprise Cloud docs.

Fees

GitHub Sponsors does not charge any fees for sponsorships from personal accounts, so 100% of these sponsorships go to the sponsored developer or organization. GitHub Sponsors charges a fee of up to 6% for sponsorships from organization accounts. The 6% fee is split between the following:

  • 3% credit card processing fee
  • 3% GitHub service processing fee

Organizations can save the 3% credit card processing fee by switching to invoiced billing for sponsorships. For more information, see Paying for GitHub Sponsors by invoice.

Privacy

Sponsored parties see sponsorship details required for recognition or fulfillment, not your underlying payment method details.

How sponsorship billing works

  1. You create a one‑time or recurring sponsorship at a chosen amount (tier or custom amount if permitted).
  2. The amount is charged (immediately for one‑time, and on each renewal cycle for recurring).
  3. Changes to amount or cancelation affect future cycles (the current paid period continues until the next renewal unless you selected a one‑time sponsorship).
  4. Ended sponsorships stop appearing as future charges but remain in historical billing records.

Proration is generally not part of sponsorship billing: changing an amount updates future renewals rather than retroactively adjusting the in‑progress period.

Further reading