GitHub & Microsoft Copilot Free for Students in 2026: What Still Works

If you are a student or teacher chasing a free Copilot in 2026, the door is open again. GitHub reopened sign-ups for its free Copilot Student plan on June 17, 2026, ending the pause that had blocked new applicants since April. Verified students and teachers get unlimited code completions plus 200 monthly AI credits for chat and agent work, though the plan runs on auto model selection only, so GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Opus 5 and Claude Fable 5 cannot be picked by hand. On the Microsoft side the blanket “verify your .edu and get 12 free months” deal is gone, replaced by a $4.99/month student rate and a hardware-linked bundle that expires on August 31, 2026.

“Copilot” still means two very different products, GitHub’s coding assistant and Microsoft’s productivity AI, and the free routes to each work differently. Below we break down what you can claim today, what each offer actually costs after the free part ends, and which option fits students versus teachers. Every offer, price and date here was checked against GitHub’s and Microsoft’s own pages in August 2026.

The Key Takeaways

• GitHub reopened Copilot sign-ups on June 17, 2026 for the Student, Pro, Pro+ and Max plans, rolling out gradually to new subscribers.
• Copilot Student is free while you stay verified, with unlimited completions and 200 AI credits a month; paid tiers run $10 Pro (1,500 credits), $39 Pro+ (7,000) and $100 Max (20,000).
• Model picking is gone on the free plans. Since June 24, 2026, Copilot Student and Copilot Free use auto model selection only, so premium models are routed to you rather than chosen by you.
• Microsoft’s open 12-month student freebie is dead. The live discount is Microsoft 365 Personal at $4.99/month, half the $9.99 list price, with re-verification every year.
• A free year of Microsoft 365 Premium still exists, but only inside the Ultimate College Bundle, which is US-only, requires buying an eligible Windows 11 PC, and ends August 31, 2026.

Copilot Free for Students in 2026: GitHub Student Plan, Microsoft 365 Discounts, Copilot Chat

There are six 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 claim today, what it costs once the free part runs out, and what changed in 2026.

Is GitHub Copilot Still Free for Students in 2026?

Yes, and you can sign up for it again. GitHub suspended new individual Copilot sign-ups in April 2026 when agent workloads outran the plan structure, then announced on June 17, 2026 that Student, Pro, Pro+ and Max were reopening “gradually over the next couple of weeks for new subscribers”. GitHub Education now advertises Copilot Student as available for free to verified students, teachers and open-source maintainers, with a live verification flow.

One pause is still in force, and it is easy to mistake for the old one. New self-serve sign-ups for Copilot Business remain paused for organizations on GitHub Free and GitHub Team plans. That restriction is about org billing, not students, so it does not touch the individual Student plan you apply for with a personal account.

What the Copilot Student Plan Includes

Since March 12, 2026, free student access has run through a dedicated Copilot Student plan rather than a donated Copilot Pro seat. You get unlimited code completions in your IDE plus 200 GitHub AI Credits a month for chat, coding agents, code review, the Copilot CLI and Spaces. Credits are priced at $0.01 each, so the student allowance is worth about $2 a month of metered usage on top of completions that are not metered at all.

That allowance is the real constraint. Agent runs and long chat sessions burn credits quickly, and heavy users on the student plan report exhausting the 200 in a single day of agentic work. Completions keep working after the credits are gone, and GitHub added an option in March to upgrade to paid Copilot Pro or Pro+ while keeping the rest of your GitHub Student Developer Pack benefits.

Auto Model Selection Is Now the Only Option

The bigger trade-off is model choice. Premium models including GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Opus 5 and Claude Fable 5 are no longer hand-selectable on the free student plan, and since June 24, 2026 auto model selection is the default and only selection experience there. Copilot picks the model for each request across OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, which for coursework and side projects is usually indistinguishable from picking one yourself.

The loss only bites if you had a specific model in mind for heavy agentic work. Paid tiers restore the picker along with far larger credit pools, at $10 for Pro with 1,500 credits, $39 for Pro+ with 7,000, and $100 for Max with 20,000. If model choice matters more to you than the badge, compare those numbers against our Claude Code pricing guide before upgrading.

How Students Claim Free GitHub Copilot

The route runs through academic verification, not a coupon code. Apply once, get approved, and the Copilot Student plan attaches to your personal GitHub account for as long as your academic status holds. The same application opens the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which is worth claiming for its other tools regardless of what you do with Copilot.

1. Sign in to GitHub with a personal account, not a school-managed org account.
2. Apply for GitHub Education on the Student Developer Pack page and start academic verification.
3. 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.
4. Wait for approval, which is often fast but can take a few days.
5. Enable Copilot in your settings. Approved accounts land on the Copilot Student plan; if the option has not appeared yet, check back, since the reopening rolled out in waves.

Keep the re-verification email visible, because free access stops when your verification lapses. Eligibility requires being 13 or older and enrolled in a degree or diploma-granting program. For the current rules, GitHub’s documentation on free Copilot access for students 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, 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. Verified teachers get the same free Copilot Student-class access, tied to the same verification cycle.

Plan cohort access separately. Individual verification is per person and can take days, so if you need guaranteed access for a whole class this term, look at classroom or organization licensing rather than assuming every student self-serves in time. For the wider set of free educator tools, see our guide to AI for teachers.

Microsoft 365 for Students: What the Free Year Really Requires Now

This is where most student guides, including our own earlier version of this page, went stale. Microsoft ran a promotion in January 2026 that handed verified higher-education students 12 free months of Microsoft 365 Premium plus LinkedIn Premium Career, but it was capped in quantity and its sign-up window closed at the end of February 2026. A separate US free-year redemption route closed on July 31, 2026. Neither is claimable today, so treat any page still promising “verify your .edu for 12 free months” as out of date.

Two Microsoft routes do work right now, and they are very different in what they ask of you. One is a straight discount you can claim with an email address, the other is a genuine free year that is attached to a hardware purchase and a deadline.

Microsoft 365 Personal at $4.99 a Month

The standing student offer is Microsoft 365 Personal at $4.99 per month, half the $9.99 list price. It covers the full desktop apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook), Copilot inside those apps, Microsoft Defender features and 1 TB of OneDrive storage. Eligibility runs to full-time and part-time students at accredited universities and colleges, verified by school email, an International Student Identity Card, a dated student ID or enrollment documents.

The catch is annual re-verification. Microsoft reminds you to confirm you are still enrolled and extends the discount if you are; if you stop qualifying, the subscription reverts to standard pricing rather than cancelling itself. Check the live terms on the Microsoft 365 student page, since Microsoft rotates these promotions by country.

The Ultimate College Bundle: A Free Year Tied to a New PC

If you are buying a laptop for school anyway, this is the better deal, and it is the only route to a free year of Microsoft 365 Premium left. Verified college students in the United States who buy a new, eligible Windows 11 PC get 1 year of Microsoft 365 Premium (advertised value $199.99), 1 year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and an Xbox Design Lab wireless controller, which Microsoft totals at $500+ in added value.

Deadline warning: the bundle runs from April 15, 2026 to 11:59pm Pacific on August 31, 2026, and redemption must be completed by 11:59pm Pacific on September 30, 2026. It is US-only, and controller shipping excludes PO boxes and some territories.

Read that as two deadlines, not one. Buying the PC before August 31 is what qualifies you; claiming the subscription afterwards is a separate step with its own September 30 cutoff, and missing it forfeits the whole bundle. Confirm the current terms on Microsoft’s back-to-school offer page before you buy, because the eligible-PC list is what actually decides the outcome.

Microsoft Copilot Chat Free With a School Account

Separate from any 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 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, so the fastest test is to sign in at copilot.microsoft.com with your school address and see what happens. If it does not work, that is an institutional setting, not a mistake on your end. Privacy is a genuine advantage here, since your data stays inside your institution’s Microsoft 365 tenant and is not used to train foundation models, which makes it the right place for 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, priced at $18 per user per month for education.

Which Free Copilot Should You Get?

It depends on what you actually do all day. If you write code, verify with GitHub first, because Copilot Student gives you unlimited completions for nothing and the sign-up queue is open again. When 200 credits a month runs dry, the honest comparison is Pro at $10 against the alternatives in our roundup of the best free AI for coding and our Cursor pricing breakdown.

If your work is essays, research, slides and email, the Microsoft side wins. Check your school account Copilot Chat first because it costs nothing and is privacy-protected, then decide between the $4.99 student rate and the Ultimate College Bundle based on whether you are buying a PC before the end of August. 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, see our best AI tools for students and our roundup of the AI deals worth grabbing in 2026.

Students and teachers can stack other discounted AI too: see our guides to Perplexity Pro for free or cheap, Cursor’s student discount, Google AI Pro for students, and the realistic options for Claude on a student budget (Anthropic has no public student discount, so the routes look different).

If verification is not an option for you, or you want more than one model without juggling subscriptions, Fello AI bundles ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek in a single Mac, iPhone and iPad app for $9.99/month. That covers code explanations, debugging and writing without separate Copilot, Cursor or Claude subscriptions, and without a verification queue. You can try Fello AI on the App Store.

Conclusion

Free Copilot for students survived 2026, and after the June reopening it is claimable again rather than something you had to catch before April. If you code, verify with GitHub Education this week and take the unlimited completions plus 200 monthly credits, then decide about paid tiers once you see how fast agents burn through them. For Pro tiers across other AI tools that still offer a real free trial, see our AI free trials master list.

On the Microsoft side, stop looking for the old free year and pick the route that matches your situation. Buying a Windows 11 PC before August 31, 2026 gets you a real free year through the Ultimate College Bundle; everyone else pays $4.99 a month and should check whether their school already turned on Copilot Chat, which is the five-minute check that most often pays off.

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