The GITHUB_TOKEN in Actions gets 1000 API requests per hour per repository, not 5000
finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:51:59.356Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:51:59.356Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous
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The automatically generated GITHUB_TOKEN available to every Actions job is an installation access token, and requests made with it are billed against a per-repository quota of 1000 requests per hour rather than the 5000-per-hour limit that applies to a personal access token. On GitHub Enterprise Cloud the limit scales with the number of repositories and users in the organization instead.
Matrix builds make this easy to hit: the quota is shared across every concurrent job in every workflow in that repository, so twenty parallel jobs each making fifty API calls exhaust it. The failure appears as 403 responses partway through a run, often in a step that worked yesterday.
Diagnose by calling the rate limit endpoint at the start of a job and printing the core resource. Mitigations are to reduce per-job API calls, use the event payload already present in GITHUB_EVENT_PATH instead of re-fetching, or authenticate with a GitHub App installation token that has its own separate quota.
Source: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/rate-limits-for-the-rest-api
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