How are multiple Copilot licenses handled?

[matrumz]

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I have an Individual license for GitHub Copilot for my account.

At my company, we use our personal accounts, which are authorized with the company's GitHub Organization, to work in the company's repositories.

How will individuals, who have an Individual license like myself, manage their licenses if we're given Copilot for Business licenses?

[davecheney]

There can only be one copilot licence active per github account. If your employer takes out a Copilot for Business subscription and assigns you a Copilot seat from their account it will refund your CfI subscription.

The details of how or what you're allowed to use your employer provided CfB Copilot seat are a matter for you and your employer to discuss.

[BenjamenMeyer]

As far as I can see, I could use my enterprise organization Copilot on my private personal projects and no one will ever even know about it.

Orgs usually have tracking. I have a Business license and am thinking of purchasing a business license for my start-up as I've found it beneficial. I know my employer that gave me the license is able to track usage since if we don't use it they'll claw back the license for others to use. However, breaking this could be a contract violation and breach of duty since part of the work agreement for many employers require a clean separation of time and resources for these kinds of things.

Keep in mind, the primary purpose of the license from the business perspective is one of liability here. If you use it outside the business that assigned the license then you may find that the use might not get covered properly if liability became an issue.

[leighmcculloch]

What happens if the user gets invited to two separate enterprises with CfB licenses?

Hi @davecheney, what happens if the user gets invited to two separate enterprises with CfB licenses with regards to premium requests? Which enterprises's premium requests get consumed?

[derberg]

• through my FOSS maintainance I have Copilot premium from Github (of course with some limits)
• that got canceled (like what?) as I got connected to the org from the company that I work with.
• I cannot switch between licenses, so of course, I used the business license for open source work too
• I reached the limit, and I do not want the company pay and increase it as I know half of limit I used on open source
• I wanted to buy limits on my personal account - this is not possible

in short: GitHub doesn't want my money

PS. being removed from the seat in the business org is not an option, as it does not work until the end of the billing month.

It all boils down to a problem that one user cannot use multiple licenses, and it is super old problem:

• similar https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/111258
• another one https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/162273

all these issues happen because one user cannot have multiple licenses active. I'd like to have a switch in VS Code in copilot, to switch between licenses. For open source, I do not need to burn limits from my company, as I do not care about IP protection (just an example)

[BenjamenMeyer]

@derberg feel free to add your use case to https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/175571

[derberg]

@BenjamenMeyer thanks, done

[wy8162]

Question: for the same GitHub user name, could I use personal license in my personal computer and use the company license in company computer?

[davecheney]

That is not currently possible. Each GitHub username can have at most one GitHub Copilot subscription.

[flash-me]

@davecheney And don't you think this would be an awesome information that should be mentioned in the documentation? 🫡

cheers
flash ⚡

[tcashel]

@davecheney I ran into this issue as well, My personal CoPilot was canceled and refunded and the Organization License superseded it with no warning or questions asked. Now am stuck not using CoPolot on personal and side projects because my SSO provider cannot disassociate my github account from my organization email, which is not a GitHub problem but a is a situation I would not be in if I could have two licenses.

I would like to pay for a personal copilot license for my personal and side projects, it creates a question of visibility and ownership if anything were to come from a personal project.

I am in a situation where I cannot use Copilot on my personal github account if I join my organization, what happens If I join two organizations that have Copliot licenses(I have not done it but plan to)?

[twojnarowski]

I have mentioned that on VS support: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Copilot-running-on-different-accounts-an/10798198
And it would seem that maybe something will change, because it is weird for me that VS doesn't even allow me to quickly disable Copilot, and I just have to open any private file and start writing a comment and already all my private data is going through my Employers tool. And in the same way, the copilot will use knowledge of the repos of my employer and leak them into my private code.

[kojiromike]

My user experience from this was that one day I was routinely using Copilot in immersive mode on github.com. Then I joined an org and suddenly Copilot was disabled. I learned that org had a Copilot Business subscription, but had inadvertently disabled "Copilot in GitHub.com".

I couldn't even use it in relation to private repos and those of other orgs. I left the offending org and re-established my personal Copilot config, but many users won't have that option.

Also, what happens if I'm a member of two orgs that have GitHub Copilot Business or Enterprise and have conflicting configurations? Which one will win? This is definitely not answered by "There can only be one copilot licence active per github account."

[BenjamenMeyer]

Which one will win?

They defined it as the stricter configuration wins out. So for your example, you'd probably end up with the strictest settings of all the orgs you belong to.

[MuradMamedov]

Does anyone know when this will be possible? Almost 2 years have passed

[seanGSISG]

How can an organization upgrade their Business licenses to the Pro+

It's mind blowing that even Enterprise version of Copilot gets fewer premium responses than Pro+

[jeffreywstevens]

I only have one GitHub account as recommended by Microsoft and, at the time, strongly recommended by my employer.
My employer has CoPilot access but severely restricts the features.
I bought a personal CoPilot license and MS of course takes my money.
I did this so that I could experiment personally with features not enabled by my employer. However, I can't set the organizational context on my personal machine for Visual Studio Code or Code Insiders. Will this be fixed anytime soon? This is hugely wrong.

[seanGSISG]

You will need to create 2 accounts

1 for personal use that you pay the subscription with and your work account. It's the only way.

What's infuriating is I am the admin of my businesses organization and it appears to be literally impossible to switch from GitHub Copilot Business/Enterprise to Pro+

You would think the business version or at least the Enterprise version would have the same premium limits....nope!

Who at GitHub came up with this plan? They are about to lose so many enterprise and small business subscriptions if they don't change things up.

Might as well register an azure account and bring your own key into GitHub Copilot, but even then.. Roo/Cline is 10x more feature pack that GitHubs extension

[riosengineer]

I think the point @jeffreywstevens is making, is that it is against the GitHub T&Cs to have multiple accounts (I believe). Therefore, we're stuck.

[nelsonec87]

I have (I guess I had) a free Pro subscription because of open-source-maintainer status. I joined a project supposed to last for only a few weeks, and I was added to their Org. Suddenly I lost access to my Pro features. That's crazy! Obviously I won't be refunded, because it was free. But what will happen when this project ends in a couple of weeks?

[abillingsley]

Curious what the behavior is if you are a member of multiple Enterprises
I work for a software consulting firm, several of our clients are on Github Enterprise and my single Github Username is associated with multiple enterprises what is the behavior in the following scenarios:

• Enterprise A brings a CoPilot license, but Enterprise B does not
• Enterprise A brings a CoPilot license and Enterprise B brings a CoPilot license

Our firm is looking to adopt GitHub Enterprise ourselves and issue CoPilot License to our staff because sometimes our work is done on repositories we manage, and other times work is managed within our client repositories, but our user identities are shared
For our Firm's Enterprise we are going to need to make use of CoPilot exclusion to allow certain repositories within our enterprise to opt out of CoPilot use

Naturally as a consultant the work our team does will shift from client to client on a relatively frequent basis

[BenjamenMeyer]

@abillingsley you get the strictest policy.

If you have a license then you can use it anywhere as long as you can hit the routes. A well setup enterprise though will block the Copilot routes to prevent usage of Copilot if they don't want you using it. However, if they fail to do so then technically any license you have would be usable. That said, I do not advise it as it would introduce a liability to the Enterprise that the Enterprise can only resolve by purchasing a license for indemnification of anything that Copilot did that it shouldn't have.

For a software consulting firm - obviously contact a lawyer for actual legal advise - but the best option would likely be to provide the license to your consultants and write it into the contract for your clients so that you are all protected; if a client wants you on their network and blocks it then you can't use it; but if they didn't want it and failed to block it then you protect the firm and your contractors. Again, consult a lawyer for actual legal advise and how to do this.

[prometheas]

I appreciate that what I'm about to suggest isn't a trivial lift for GitHub to implement, but you guys really need to figure out how to support the scenario where by a single GitHub user can use an employer's Copilot credits for any and all work performed on their org's repositories whilst allowing use of self-paid Copilot for work on repositories NOT in such orgs.

It's about more than billing; an org may restrict (in some cases severely) access to Copilot features, and this interferes with my own usage. I am a consultant and need to work on several projects at once. At times, I've even actively had to work with multiple orgs.

A restrictive set of policies applied by one org can have severe impact on my ability to work on even my privately-maintained projects.

I acknowledge that GitHub presently recommends use of multiple GitHub accounts, which is functional. But that creates multiple accounts to have to set up and check for notifications, PRs, issue assignments, and so on. And let's face it, GH notifications aren't exactly a beacon of UX these days, so the multi-account strategy officially proposed by GH turns into a real nightmare quickly.

With respect, you guys really need to step up on this Copilot usage conundrum.

[kojiromike]

Yes. To summarize, this limitation on copilot is really problematic for consultants and using multiple accounts to work around it is also harmful to consultants in various ways.

[BenjamenMeyer]

I acknowledge that GitHub presently recommends use of multiple GitHub accounts, which is functional. But that creates multiple accounts to have to set up and check for notifications, PRs, issue assignments, and so on. And let's face it, GH notifications aren't exactly a beacon of UX these days, so the multi-account strategy officially proposed by GH turns into a real nightmare quickly.

I was thinking about this in an unrelated manner to this; but it involves this too - I started a new employer and had to setup another GH account for them. It'd be nice if I could have setup a subaccount of my primary account that could be more restricted for their usage while still giving me the ability to manage credentials better via my primary account. Again, I realize its no simple issue but it could make this whole issue easier too.

Filed #175571 for this

[kojiromike]

It'd be nice if I could have setup a subaccount of my primary account

That's an interesting idea for more than just copilot. It'd make granting app privileges more structured as well, perhaps.

[SoundsSerious]

This is the obvious answer get on it @github

[twojnarowski]

I was hit with "all limit used" in Copilot recently. I have a paid licence in my organization. But somehow Copilot used up all my "free personal" licence limits and won't let me use Copilot anymore. What are we paying for?

[FNICKE]

Multiple GitHub Copilot licenses are tied to the GitHub account that owns or manages them.

If you have one personal Copilot license, it’s linked directly to your individual GitHub account.

If you’re part of an organization or enterprise, licenses are usually managed by the organization owner/admin. The admin assigns Copilot seats to members, and each user gets access through their GitHub account.

A single user doesn’t need (or use) more than one license at the same time—Copilot will just check if your account has an active license (either personal or organizational).

If you happen to have both a personal and an organizational license, GitHub will prioritize the organization-provided license, so your personal subscription isn’t used unnecessarily.

[mjmikulski]

If you happen to have both a personal and an organizational license, GitHub will prioritize the organization-provided license, so your personal subscription isn’t used unnecessarily.

This is very unfortunate because of 2 reasons:

• legal: using company-paid software for doing private things causes IP ownership problems.
• technical: an organization can force restriced settings, while you may want to privately use different copilot settings.

[BenjamenMeyer]

If you’re part of an organization or enterprise, licenses are usually managed by the organization owner/admin. The admin assigns Copilot seats to members, and each user gets access through their GitHub account.

If you read this full issue and the responses, it's not that one license is prioritized over another. They're all equal per se. It's that GitHub applies the most restrictive policies of all the licenses to the account.

@mjmikulski there is no IP ownership issue; the issue is one of liability since GitHub doesn't prevent one org from benefiting from the license issued by another org; once you have a license you can use it for all of you work (multiple employers, personal, etc); however, the only one that is likely protected by the liability offered by the license is the org that issued the license - leaving everyone else in a very grey legal space should Copilot do something that would be create a license violation, IP infringement, etc.

[ferrywlto]

Let me also share my case: My company has a restriction on using non OpenAI models. Which after I joined my company organization, I have been locked out from using all the Claude models as my personal subscription refunded. Which is very annoying. Then I cannot use Copilot for my personal stuff as of IP ownership issues mentioned by @mjmikulski

[jonathan-s]

@davecheney I really wish that Github would take a look at this. It's definitely an issue for these two reasons.

• legal: using company-paid software for doing private things causes IP ownership problems.
• technical: an organization can force restriced settings, while you may want to privately use different copilot settings.

[WayneRockett]

I'm hitting the same problem now.

Organisation has given me a seat, which in turn kills my personal paid copilot.

Why is it so hard to have both, have the organisation seat just cover the repos that they want, have a personal one to cover the repos you want.

[qoda]

This is a very annoying "bug". Our organisation doesn't want developers using co-pilot premium requests on personal projects, however short of getting everyone to create new users for the org there is no way around this issue. Even when staying unauthenticated to the org on my personal machine I'm still forced to use the org seat as my personal co-pilot licence was removed.

[BenjamenMeyer]

this is one reason I proposed https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/175571

[scott-moxham]

Given we already have orgs to separate repos, I'm not sure what that would give.
However my org uses Azure DevOps for the repos, only using GitHub for the copilot license so licence would need to be selectable in VS/VS Code rather than based on repos for me.

[apetta]

I am baffled this hasn't been thought through properly. I don't see how this product is viable without this separation of personal vs. business copilot subscriptions for a single GH account. You should be able to just choose which subscription to apply in VS Code.

[DotJoshJohnson]

Especially confusing considering this would increase revenue for GH. My employer pays for the copilot business subscription that caused my personal subscription to be auto-cancelled. I'd still be paying for a personal subscription if I had the ability keep both linked to my account.

[moeezmir]

How Multiple Copilot Licenses Are Handled
Per User Basis

Copilot licenses are generally assigned to individual users.

If a person has multiple accounts (e.g., work and personal), each account needs its own license.

Per Product / Platform

Microsoft offers Copilot across different products (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Dynamics 365 Copilot).

Licenses are not interchangeable — a GitHub Copilot license doesn’t automatically give you access to Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Enterprise Licensing

Organizations can purchase multiple licenses in bulk and assign them to users via their admin portal.

Admins can reassign licenses if someone leaves or roles change.

Multiple Licenses for One User

If you need Copilot in different ecosystems (say GitHub and Microsoft 365), you may end up with two separate licenses tied to the same identity.

Microsoft’s licensing system keeps them distinct, even if they’re billed under the same organization.

Billing & Management

Licenses are tracked in the Microsoft Admin Center (for Microsoft 365 Copilot) or GitHub billing (for GitHub Copilot).

Consolidated billing is possible for enterprises, but technically the licenses remain product-specific.

[espenhk]

This is problematic for more than the personal vs organizational-case.

For more or less any consultant, you will have more than one organization active at any one time: one for client A and one for client B, and maybe also one for the consulting firm you're employed by.

Having code from organization 1 be billed through organization 2 is a massive issue, for legal reasons. This leaves us three options:

1. Have multiple GitHub-accounts. This is not only impractical, it's been discouraged by GH for years.
2. Use Copilot for only one organization, and turn it off for another (as well as your personal projects). You have to do this even if organization B pays for Copilot, effectively limiting what they're paying you to do.
3. Use 0x-models for organization B. This comes with some of the problems of (2), you're not doing all org B pays you to do, while still consuming requests from organization B.
4. Your consulting firm pays the Copilot license. This is a financial issue, since the firm might be unwilling or have policies against Copilot use for internal projects, as well as the issue of who do they bill that to? Contracts with clients may not allow passing that cost on, at which point the firm is taking a larger financial hit.

Depending on how data isolation works in Copilot, (3) might be a non-starter. It's also wrong on principle. (4) is a financial liability, (2) is a potential contract breach and (1) is discouraged by GH.

Leaving (1) as the only acceptable option, really. If I'd been practicing that for my professional life, I'd be about 15 accounts deep at this point. One account and learning to manage email filtering, SSH keys and SSO auth etc, is much better. But now Copilot is in the way of that.

This needs resolving, and consultants are not an edge-case for GH. We're a large part of your user base, and an even bigger part of users bringing income for GH.

[espenhk]

The attribution is tricky, yes, but aren't there other tools in place that already solve this for "regular" development?

For instance, I can split out so one repo uses one of my emails and another uses the other (I'll be working with one account in this example). I can configure separate SSH keys for separate organizations (SSO-enabled, often), separate machines or even separate repos -- or any combination of these. With this, my git activity is attributable to the relevant email, the relevant organization, even the relevant machine if I want it to be (or someone requires it).

What I need is a way to (by repo or org) control Copilot-attribution in the same way I do with all these. Sure, multiple origin becomes more tricky, but isn't that quite a minority of repos compared to the single-origin case? Forks, sure, but those still attribute to the user/org that forked it and in most cases it would make sense to attribute Copilot use to the forking actor, not the upstream.

Right now, multiple accounts and option 4 are the only ones that really work -- the former gets messy if you're forced to do it for every client (I know some do anyway), and the latter requires you to place cost like you describe. Even then, even if you wanted to, you couldn't have the firm pay for subscription and some basic level of use, and the client pay for extra tokens. OK one client sets up a rig for 20 agents with two levels of orchestrators, boosting productivity but producing billions of tokens. Do they get to just shift that cost to the consulting firm? It leaves an incentive for consultants to go "here but not further" with coding assistants and agents.

I think it makes sense from a client perspective, but with policies and adoption rates heavily spread and me working in a massive firm, I'm already seeing clients that just pay for it for us. Now it's down to me to make sure I'm not using one clients subscription for another client. BRB making multiple accounts.

[BenjamenMeyer]

@espenhk you'd probably be interested in https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/175571 as well as it should help for that consulting use-case too.

[espenhk]

@espenhk you'd probably be interested in https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/175571 as well as it should help for that consulting use-case too.

Thanks for the tip! It definitely would, but tbh that sounds like a bigger change than what is suggested here. Might be a good idea, but sounds quite monumental at least from a decision standpoint. Probably also from a technical one, would probably have to be a contribution to git involved?

[BenjamenMeyer]

@espenhk no git contribution would be needed - it's more or less how to handle multiple GitHub accounts from a single account so you'd have a sub-account per client where each sub-account could have their own Copilot settings, restrictions, etc - it's entirely about GitHub - essentially making your 1 more feasible since you'd be able to use a single login for GH itself and then switch profiles in GH.

Adding multiple profiles to git itself might be helpful too, but not strictly necessary.

[espenhk]

@espenhk no git contribution would be needed - it's more or less how to handle multiple GitHub accounts from a single account so you'd have a sub-account per client where each sub-account could have their own Copilot settings, restrictions, etc - it's entirely about GitHub - essentially making your 1 more feasible since you'd be able to use a single login for GH itself and then switch profiles in GH.

Adding multiple profiles to git itself might be helpful too, but not strictly necessary.

Fair enough. Still, big decision and potentially big change. But would also solve my worries, yes.

[mjmikulski]

Forget about that and use Claude Code ;)

[TariqKingCoder]

Multiple GitHub Copilot licenses are handled on a per‑account basis: only one Copilot license can be active for a single GitHub account at a time. If you already have an Individual Copilot license and your company assigns you a Copilot for Business seat, the business license will take precedence and your individual subscription will be automatically refunded. If you want to use Copilot across both a personal and a work account, each account would need its own subscription since licenses are tied to accounts, not devices.

[twojnarowski]

This is incorrect. I have two Copilot business licences, and when I couldn't use it, because my personal limit was 100% used.

[HarpreetSingh46]

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I have an Individual license for GitHub Copilot for my account.

At my company, we use our personal accounts, which are authorized with the company's GitHub Organization, to work in the company's repositories.

How will individuals, who have an Individual license like myself, manage their licenses if we're given Copilot for Business licenses?

When an organization has multiple Copilot licenses, it simply means they’ve purchased access for multiple users. Each license is assigned to one person, so if a company buys 10 licenses, 10 different users can use Copilot. These licenses aren’t permanent — an admin can remove a license from one user and assign it to another whenever needed. In cases where someone has both a personal and a company license (like with GitHub Copilot), the company license usually takes priority. Overall, multiple licenses are just a way to let several people use Copilot, while giving admins control to manage and reassign access easily.