If you are a student or teacher hoping to get Copilot free in 2026, the rules changed sharply this spring. GitHub paused new sign-ups for its free Copilot Student plan on April 20, 2026, with no reopening date announced. Verified students who activated Copilot before the pause keep free access under the new GitHub Copilot Student plan, live since March 12, 2026. On that plan, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.3-Codex, and Claude Opus and Sonnet are no longer pickable by hand. On the Microsoft side, eligible college students can still get Microsoft 365 Premium free for 12 months (then $19.99/month), and Copilot Chat is free with a school account on Microsoft 365 A1, A3, or A5.
“Copilot” still means two very different products: GitHub’s coding assistant and Microsoft’s productivity AI, and the free routes to each now work differently. Below we break down exactly what is still claimable today, what is paused, what already-verified students keep, and which option fits students versus teachers. We verified every offer, price, and date against GitHub’s and Microsoft’s official pages in mid-May 2026.
The Key Takeaways
- GitHub paused new sign-ups for Copilot Student, Pro, and Pro+ on April 20, 2026, with no reopening date announced.
- Already-verified students keep free Copilot under the new GitHub Copilot Student plan (since March 12, 2026); GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus are no longer self-selectable, but Auto mode still rotates strong models.
- Microsoft 365 Premium is free for 12 months for verified college students, then $19.99/month, with Copilot in the desktop Office apps and 1 TB OneDrive per person.
- Copilot Chat is free at no extra cost with a school Microsoft 365 A1, A3, or A5 account for higher-ed students and staff aged 13+, if your IT admin enables it.
- The GitHub Student Developer Pack is still open for its other perks, and Copilot Free (the limited tier) is still available to anyone.
Copilot Free for Students in 2026: GitHub Student Plan (Paused), Microsoft 365 Premium (12 Months Free), Copilot Chat (School Account)
There are now five distinct ways students and teachers touch a free or near-free Copilot, and they do not conflict because each is tied to a different account. The table below is the fastest way to see what you can actually claim today, what it costs, and what changed in 2026.
| Offer | Cost | Who it’s for | What you get | Status (May 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot Student plan | Free while verified | Verified students & teachers | AI coding in your IDE, Auto-mode models | New sign-ups PAUSED since Apr 20; existing users keep it |
| GitHub Copilot Free | Free | Anyone with a GitHub account | Limited completions & chat, capped requests | Open to new sign-ups |
| Microsoft 365 Premium (student offer) | Free 12 months, then $19.99/mo | Verified college students | Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Copilot in apps, 1 TB OneDrive/person | Live now |
| Microsoft Copilot Chat (school account) | No extra cost | Higher-ed students & staff 13+ on A1/A3/A5 | Secure AI chat, file uploads, web grounding | Live (IT must enable) |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot (deep add-on) | $18/user/mo (paid) | Schools that license it | Copilot inside Word, Excel, Teams + Graph | Paid add-on, not free |
Is GitHub Copilot Still Free for Students in 2026?
The honest answer is “yes, but only if you were already verified.” Free Copilot for students still exists, and GitHub has not removed it from anyone who had it. What changed is that the door for new people is shut for now. On April 20, 2026, GitHub paused new sign-ups for Copilot Pro, Copilot Pro+, and the free Copilot Student plan, and it has not given a reopening date.
GitHub’s VP of product, Joe Binder, tied the pause to runaway compute from AI agents. “Agentic workflows have fundamentally changed Copilot’s compute demands. Long-running, parallelized sessions now regularly consume far more resources than the original plan structure was built to support,” he said. The practical effect for students is simple. If you already had Copilot Student active, nothing was taken away; if you are trying to claim it now, you land on the limited Copilot Free tier instead until the pause lifts.
What Changed: The GitHub Copilot Student Plan (March 12, 2026)
Before the sign-up pause, GitHub had already reorganized how free student access works. Since March 12, 2026, complimentary Copilot for verified students is managed under a dedicated GitHub Copilot Student plan rather than a free Copilot Pro seat. Verified students did not need to do anything; academic verification status carried over automatically, and the rest of the Student Developer Pack benefits stayed intact.
The catch is model access. As part of the change, premium models including GPT-5.4, GPT-5.3-Codex, and Claude Opus and Sonnet are no longer available for hand-selection on the free student plan. You still get a capable model set through Auto mode, which routes requests across models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. On March 13, GitHub also added an option to upgrade from the Student plan to paid Copilot Pro or Pro+ while keeping the rest of your GitHub Student Developer Pack. For most coursework and side projects the Auto-mode set is more than enough; the loss only stings if you specifically wanted to pin Opus for heavy agentic work.
Why New Sign-Ups Are Paused (April 20, 2026)
The April pause is broader than the student plan. New sign-ups for Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student are all suspended, GitHub adjusted usage limits on individual plans, and it pulled Opus models from the Pro tier (Opus 4.7 remains on Pro+ for now). GitHub’s official announcement is blunt about the timeline: “We do not have an estimated timeframe to share yet for when the pause will end.”
Existing subscribers were protected. Current Copilot Student, Pro, and Pro+ users were not removed, and verified students who had already activated Copilot Student could still upgrade to a paid tier. GitHub also opened a refund window for anyone unhappy with the new limits, letting Pro and Pro+ subscribers cancel and claim a refund through their billing settings, an option available through May 20, 2026. If you are a new student, your realistic path right now is the Copilot Free tier plus the other Student Developer Pack perks, and watching GitHub’s announcement thread for the reopening.
How Verified Students Keep Free GitHub Copilot
If you were verified before the pause, your free Copilot Student plan stays active as long as your academic status holds. GitHub re-checks eligibility periodically and emails you when it is time to re-verify, so the most important thing you can do is not let that lapse. The application flow below still opens the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which is worth claiming for its other tools even while the Copilot Student upgrade is paused for new applicants.
- Sign in to GitHub with a personal account (not a school-managed org account).
- Apply for GitHub Education on the Student Developer Pack page and start academic verification.
- Prove your status with a school-issued email (.edu or equivalent) and, if asked, a photo of a valid student ID, transcript, or class schedule.
- Wait for approval, which is often fast but can take a few days.
- Check your Copilot settings. If you were verified before the pause, the Copilot Student plan shows as active; new approvals currently land on Copilot Free until sign-ups reopen.
Keep that re-verification email visible, because if your verification expires your free Copilot access stops with it, and re-enrolling into the paid student plan is exactly what is paused right now. For the full eligibility rules and current status, GitHub’s documentation is the source that updates first.
How Teachers Get GitHub Copilot Free
The teacher path mirrors the student one and lives in the same GitHub Education portal, just on the “Teachers” track. You sign in with a personal GitHub account, apply as an educator, and verify employment with a faculty ID, an employment letter, or a recent payslip. Once verified, eligible teachers get the same free Copilot Student-class access tied to their verified status.
The same April pause caveat applies. Faculty who were verified before April 20 keep their free seat, while brand-new educator applications currently resolve to Copilot Free until GitHub reopens sign-ups. If you teach a coding course and need guaranteed access for a cohort, plan around classroom or organization licensing rather than assuming every student can self-serve a free seat this term.
Microsoft 365 Premium: Free for 12 Months, Then $19.99/Month
This is the strongest offer in this guide that is still fully claimable today. On its official student page, Microsoft gives verified college students 12 free months of Microsoft 365 Premium (Microsoft’s consumer Microsoft 365 subscription), after which it renews at $19.99 per month. The subscription includes the full desktop apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook), Microsoft Copilot built into those apps, AI image creation in Copilot chat, Microsoft Defender features, and OneDrive cloud storage with up to 6 TB total at 1 TB per person.
Eligibility is the part to read carefully. The offer is for higher-education students, verified with a college or university email and a valid Microsoft account, and it is not aimed at K-12 students. A payment instrument is required at sign-up even though you are not charged for the first year, so set a calendar reminder before month 12 if you do not want it to roll into the paid student rate. Microsoft runs this as a promotion, so the exact terms and any sign-up window can shift by country; confirm the live details on the Microsoft 365 student page before you rely on a date.
Microsoft Copilot Chat Free With a School Account
Separate from the personal subscription, many students and staff already have a secure Copilot for free through their institution. Copilot Chat is included at no additional cost for anyone signed in with a school or work account on a Microsoft 365 A1, A3, or A5 license. Microsoft currently makes it available to faculty, staff, and higher-education students aged 13 and older. It runs at copilot.microsoft.com and inside the web versions of apps like Word and PowerPoint when you sign in with your school email.
The one real gate is your IT administrator, who has to switch it on for students and staff, so the fastest test is simply to sign in at copilot.microsoft.com with your school address and see if it works. If it does not, that is an institutional setting, not a mistake on your end. Privacy is a genuine advantage here: with the school account, your data stays isolated inside your institution’s Microsoft 365 tenant and is not used to train foundation models, which is why it is the right place to put any sensitive coursework.
Good to know: Copilot Chat is the no-extra-cost part. The deeper Microsoft 365 Copilot that works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams with Microsoft Graph access is a separate paid add-on for schools, priced at $18 per user per month for education.
Which Free Copilot Should You Get?
It depends on what you actually do. If you write code and you were verified before the April pause, your GitHub Copilot Student plan is the one to lean on, with Auto mode handling model selection. If you are a new coder who missed the window, do not wait around for a single tool; the limited Copilot Free tier covers light use. There are strong free options worth comparing in our roundup of the best free AI for coding, plus cheap paid routes in our Cursor pricing breakdown and Claude Code pricing guide.
If your work is essays, research, slides, and email, the Microsoft side wins. Check your school account Copilot Chat first because it is free and privacy-protected, then add Microsoft 365 Premium if you want Copilot inside the full desktop apps and a year at no cost. Most students should quietly collect more than one of these, since they sit on different accounts and serve different jobs. For everything else worth claiming this year, our roundup of the AI deals worth grabbing in 2026 is the companion list.
Students and teachers can stack other discounted AI too: see our guides to Perplexity Pro for free or cheap, Cursor’s student discount, and Google AI Pro for students.
If you missed the GitHub sign-up pause and do not want to wait for an unknown reopen date, you do not have to bet on one vendor. Fello AI bundles ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek in a single Mac, iPhone, and iPad app for $9.99/month, which covers code explanations, debugging, and writing without separate Copilot, Cursor, or Claude subscriptions or another verification queue. It is a steady fallback while the official student route is closed; you can try Fello AI on the App Store.
Conclusion
Free Copilot for students did not disappear in 2026, but the easy “apply today and get Copilot Pro” era did. If you were verified before April 20, 2026, protect what you have by keeping your GitHub academic verification current. If you are new, claim the GitHub Student Developer Pack for its other perks, use Copilot Free while sign-ups are paused, and treat Microsoft 365 Premium’s 12 free months plus your school Copilot Chat as the offers that still pay off immediately. The single best move right now is five minutes spent verifying with Microsoft and checking whether your school already turned Copilot on.
FAQ
Is GitHub Copilot still free for students in 2026?
Yes for already-verified students, who keep free access under the GitHub Copilot Student plan. New sign-ups for that plan were paused on April 20, 2026 with no reopening date, so brand-new applicants currently land on the limited Copilot Free tier instead.
What is the GitHub Copilot Student plan?
Since March 12, 2026, GitHub manages free student Copilot under a dedicated Student plan instead of a free Pro seat. Verified students did not need to take any action, but premium models like GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus are no longer hand-selectable; Auto mode still rotates strong models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Can I still get Microsoft 365 free as a college student?
Yes. Microsoft’s official student page gives verified college students 12 free months of Microsoft 365 Premium, then $19.99 per month. It bundles the full desktop apps, Copilot inside them, and OneDrive storage, but needs a payment method up front, so cancel before month 12.
Why don’t I see Microsoft Copilot with my school account?
It almost always means your school’s IT administrator has not enabled Copilot Chat for your account, or your institution does not hold a Microsoft 365 A1, A3, or A5 license. The free Copilot Chat is for higher-education students and staff aged 13 and older, and enablement is an institutional choice, not something you did wrong.
What is the difference between Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Copilot Chat is the secure browser and web-app chat included at no extra cost with an eligible school account. Microsoft 365 Copilot is the deeper assistant that works directly inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams with Microsoft Graph; for education it is a paid add-on priced at $18 per user per month.
Can I use both my school Copilot and a personal Microsoft 365 subscription?
Yes, they sit on two different accounts and do not conflict. Use the school account Copilot Chat for sensitive coursework because it is governed by your institution’s privacy rules, and use a personal Microsoft 365 Premium subscription for personal projects.
Does GitHub Copilot use my student code for training?
For individual users, including students on the free plan, GitHub says it does not use your prompts, suggestions, or code snippets to train its models by default. Copilot still sends code to GitHub’s servers to generate suggestions, but that data is not used for model training; you can review the privacy options in your Copilot settings at any time.
