Codex Usage Limits and Pricing in 2026: Pro 100, Pro 200, Pro 500, Resets, and 'Model at Capacity' Errors

Codex does not have its own subscription - it is included in your ChatGPT plan, and every plan shares one usage allowance between Codex and ChatGPT Work. On September 29, 2026, OpenAI reopened Pro $200 to new subscribers with roughly half the old usage value, added a $500 Pro tier with Astra Ultrafast, and left Plus at $20/month. Existing Pro $200 subscribers keep their previous allowance through October 29, 2026, then move to the lower allowance at the same price.

Weekly limits are the cap that matters on the Pro side now: OpenAI's pricing doc says Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit. Plus and Business usage is still measured per five-hour window with weekly caps on top; when you run out, you wait for the reset shown in your usage dashboard, buy credits, or run Codex with an API key.

"Selected model is at capacity" is a different problem: it is OpenAI-side serving capacity, not your quota. Switch models with /model or retry later.

Last updated: September 29, 2026. The September 29 plan changes and Pro limits were checked against OpenAI's pricing doc, the Pro tiers help article, and a post from OpenAI's Codex lead; the rest was verified on September 28. OpenAI changes models and limits often, so treat the tables as a snapshot and confirm in your own dashboard.

Official Sources#

If you are comparing against Anthropic's side, our Claude Code usage limits playbook covers the same questions for Pro and Max, and the AI coding tools pricing comparison puts both next to the rest of the market.

Codex Pricing by Plan#

From the pricing page, fetched September 29, 2026:

If you are deciding between the cheap tiers rather than the Pro tiers, the Free, Go and Plus split also changes which GPT-6 model you get in Chat; ChatGPT Free vs Go vs Plus after GPT-6 lays out each plan side by side.

The three-tier Pro lineup comes from OpenAI's Pro tiers article: Pro 100 at $100/month, Pro 200 at $200/month, and Pro 500 at $500/month, with Ultrafast included only on Pro 500. The same article says new Pro 200 subscriptions that are not eligible for grandfathering "include a lower usage allowance than previously offered with Pro 200 to reflect our increasingly efficient models." OpenAI's Codex lead put a number on it in his September 29 post: the change will "net out at half the dollar in API spend."

One more thing on the page worth knowing now: GPT-5.5 retires from ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex on all plans on October 14, 2026. The API is not affected. If your config pins gpt-5.5, move it before then.

How Much Codex Usage Each Plan Gets#

OpenAI publishes ranges of local messages per five-hour period for Plus and Standard Business, per model, because task size drives consumption. Its pricing doc now states that Pro plans have no five-hour limit and lists no per-model message ranges for them, so the number a Pro subscriber has to manage is the weekly allowance. Selected rows from the pricing page, fetched September 29, 2026:

How to read it:

• Model choice dominates. On Plus, the same five-hour window is roughly 5-45 GPT-6 Astra messages or 350-3,000 GPT-6 Luna messages. Astra is the expensive lane; use it for the work that needs it.
• Pro is weekly-metered. The old Pro 5x and 20x message ranges are gone from the public pricing doc. The Codex lead says the five-hour limit will not return, so a Pro subscriber can spend the weekly allowance in one long push, and the new Pro 200 allowance is sized around that.
• Local and cloud share one pool. Local messages and cloud chats draw from the same allowance, and cloud chats may use more per task than local messages.
• Weekly limits may also apply. The five-hour window is not the only cap.
• Some things burn faster. Fast mode uses included limits at 2.5x the Standard rate, Astra Ultrafast at 8x (and purchased credits at 6x), and image generation uses included limits about 3-5x faster on average.
• Enterprise and Edu with flexible pricing have no fixed rate limits; usage scales with credits. Without flexible pricing, those seats get the same per-seat limits as Plus for most features.

How Codex Resets Work#

This is the part most people search for. Per the pricing page and CLI docs:

1. Know which clock applies. Plus and Standard Business usage is metered per five-hour period with weekly limits on top; hitting the weekly cap means waiting for the weekly reset even if a new five-hour window has started. As of September 29, 2026, Pro plans have no five-hour limit, so on Pro the weekly allowance is the clock that gates you.
2. The reset time is shown to you. The usage dashboard shows current limits and reset times. There is no separate official "reset tracker" - the dashboard is it.
3. Check from the terminal. In Codex CLI, /status shows the active model and token usage, and the pricing page says it shows your remaining limits during a session. /usage opens account usage (/usage daily, /usage weekly, /usage cumulative) and is also where you redeem an available earned reset. /statusline can pin a limits field to the TUI footer so you see it continuously.
4. Per-model allowances reset separately. OpenAI's Pro article notes that some models have separate allowances; when you hit one, that model may be temporarily unavailable until its allowance resets, and ChatGPT shows the reset time. Other models stay usable.
5. Earned (banked) resets. Codex has granted rate-limit resets you can bank and redeem later. The pricing page describes a June 11-24, 2026 referral window where eligible Plus and Pro users and their invitees each received a banked rate-limit reset usable for 30 days. Redeem one through /usage.
6. Support cannot reset you. The Pro article is explicit: OpenAI Support does not reset ChatGPT or Codex usage limits. Contact them only if usage looks miscounted or access does not return after the stated reset time.

What happens when you hit the limit mid-task#

OpenAI says that if you reach your limit during an active turn, the agent can finish that turn, subject to fair use. After that, your options are:

• wait for the reset time in the dashboard;
• Plus and Pro: buy additional credits and keep working without upgrading;
• Business, Edu, Enterprise with flexible pricing: buy workspace credits;
• anyone: run extra local sessions with an API key, billed at standard API rates.

Credits: What Overflow Actually Costs#

Credits are the unit for usage beyond your included limits. The pricing page quotes Standard-speed rates in credits per million tokens:

Two notes from the same page: GPT-5.6 usage averages 5-30 credits per message, and credit purchase prices and discounts depend on your plan, so check the Plus and Pro credits article for what a credit costs you. The spread matters more than the absolute numbers - Astra output is 100x the credit rate of Luna output.

For a model-level comparison of what the flagship tiers cost via API, see GPT-6 Sol vs Opus 5.5 vs Grok 4.7 pricing.

What Changed on September 29, 2026#

The Pro $200 pause from September 10 is over, and the plan that came back is not the plan that left. Pro 20x, the old name for the $200 tier, is back with the same price and a smaller allowance for new subscribers. From OpenAI's Pro tiers article and the announcement post from OpenAI's Codex lead:

• Pro 200 is open to new subscribers again. New subscriptions that are not eligible for grandfathering get a lower usage allowance than the old Pro 20x, while the price stays $200/month. OpenAI's stated reason is that its models are "increasingly efficient"; the Codex lead's version is blunter: the change will "net out at half the dollar in API spend."
• Existing Pro 200 subscribers are grandfathered through October 29, 2026. If the subscription was active at the eligibility cutoff, or during the seven days before it, the old allowance continues while the subscription is active, then the account moves to the lower allowance at the same $200/month. Only affected users get an email.
• Pro 500 costs $500/month and is the only Pro plan with Astra Ultrafast. Ultrafast uses the plan's included usage first and then draws from credits, and buying credits on Pro 100 or Pro 200 does not unlock it at launch.
• The five-hour limit is not coming back on Pro. The stated trade is that subscribers can spend the weekly allowance whenever they want instead of rationing it across five-hour windows.
• What did not change: Pro 100 is still $100/month, Plus is still $20/month, and credits remain the overflow path on Plus and Pro.

The strategic read: the winners are OpenAI's margin story and Anthropic, which still sells a $200 heavy tier into the same buyers. The losers are heavy Codex subscribers who treated $200 as a fixed-price compute pool, because the same dollar now buys roughly half the API-equivalent work on a new Pro 200 allowance. The second-order effect is that the subscription-versus-API gap is closing on purpose: OpenAI says it wants subscription value and API value per dollar to converge, which turns every plan comparison into an API-cost comparison over time and makes metered stacks more attractive for bursty workloads.

What to do now:

1. Check your status before you change anything. The usage dashboard shows current limits and reset times, and /status and /usage in the CLI show what is left. If you are grandfathered, cancelling can cost you the old allowance; the Pro article only restores it for subscriptions that lapsed in the seven days before the cutoff.
2. Re-baseline your real burn. Run one normal week, then check /usage weekly and the dashboard. If you never come close to the weekly allowance, Pro 100 or Plus plus credits is cheaper than Pro 500.
3. Price the overflow before you buy it. Credits on a paid plan, or an API key for long automated runs, are usually cheaper than jumping a tier for occasional peaks. Compare per-model rates in GPT-6 Sol vs Opus 5.5 vs Grok 4.7 pricing, and see the GPT-6.1 Sol release guide for the model that makes downgrading viable: near-Astra work at $2/$10 per million tokens.
4. Do not upgrade to Pro 500 just for Ultrafast. Ultrafast consumes included usage at 8x the Standard rate (6x on purchased credits), so it is a latency tool, not a way to stretch a quota.

Separately, OpenAI is collecting "Codex Originals" stories from users through a public form during DevDay week, which is a useful reminder of who the plan changes are aimed at.

What People Are Actually Saying#

The reaction split into three camps within hours: this is a rug pull, this was always going to happen, and $500 is still fine if the time saved pays for it.

• On Hacker News, the top comment on the ChatGPT Pro 500 thread (132 points, 122 comments) mocked the "increasingly efficient models" justification for a lower allowance, and several replies compared the sequence to ride-hailing price rises after the subsidy era: cheap to win the market, expensive once you depend on it. The same thread produced the counter-case. One commenter argued $500 is defensible for a one-person business that deducts it, and another said they would still pay $1,000 for the time saved.
• The reopening announcement thread (73 points) focused on the math. The common reading is that $200 becomes roughly "10x" where it was 20x, and that $500 buys back approximately the old $200 value. A Pro user replied that the current 20x plan is already hard to use at times because GPT-6 models are congested, which takes some of the edge off the downgrade.
• On r/codex, the thread is titled "Codex for developers changed forever today" and the OP calls it a rug pull. Prominent replies argue OpenAI does not want power users, predict migration to Claude plans plus cheap API models for subagents, and one practitioner reported two people on a $100 Claude plan barely hitting weekly limits on Opus 5.5 across five projects. Treat plan-comparison anecdotes as community claims, not measured benchmarks.
• On r/Anthropic, the sharpest disagreement is whether Anthropic is any different. One camp says Anthropic will follow once it finishes buying market share; the other argues these plans were never meaningfully subsidized and that inference is profitable even at maxed-out allowances. Nobody in the thread has Anthropic's cost data, so both sides are estimates with arithmetic attached.
• On r/LocalLLaMA, the mood is "called it." Expect $1,000 tiers next, and use the alternative that already exists: one commenter described running most work through cheap open-weight API models for cents per session.

The vendor response worth weighing: the Codex lead says the subscription guarantee is more work done over time per dollar, delivered through API price cuts (GPT-6 Sol and Luna dropped to half their previous price this week), and that OpenAI is adding more subscription features that will not draw on usage.

"Selected Model Is at Capacity": What It Means and What to Do#

The exact error is:

Selected model is at capacity. Please try a different model.

This is not your usage limit. It means the model's serving capacity is saturated on OpenAI's side. Two open GitHub issues on the official repo document recent waves:

• openai/codex#41790, opened August 31, 2026 by a Pro user who hit the error repeatedly during normal agent tasks with plenty of usage remaining, with Codex entering retry backoff and resuming between failures.
• openai/codex#43738, opened September 8, 2026, collecting reports after the GPT-6 Astra launch of the error across CLI, IDE, and web users, still open as of September 28.

These are user reports, not an official incident postmortem, so treat them as signal rather than root cause. What actually helps:

1. Do what the error says: switch models. In the CLI, /model changes the active model and reasoning effort mid-session; /status confirms the change. From the shell, codex --model <name> or codex exec -m <name> picks one per run. Moving from Astra to Sol, or Sol to Luna, often gets you unblocked for work that does not need the top model; the current model lineup is the place to confirm names. Since September 29, GPT-6.1 Sol covers most Astra-class work at a fifth of the price, which makes the downgrade cheaper to take.
2. Check OpenAI status before debugging your config.
3. Keep long runs resumable. For unattended loops, write progress notes and make tasks idempotent so a capacity failure costs a retry, not the whole run. codex exec resume --last continues the most recent non-interactive session. Our Codex exec headless guide covers the CI side.
4. Do not upgrade your plan to fix it. A bigger allowance does not buy serving capacity. The pricing page does list priority request processing for Enterprise and Edu, which is the only plan-level lever aimed at contention.

Codex vs Claude Code Limits at a Glance#

Anthropic's Max pricing page says Max gives "5x or 20x more usage per 5-hour session than Pro" and that Claude Code shares the same usage limits as the rest of the plan; the Claude Code with Pro or Max support article lists usage credits and API credits as the overflow paths. The plan ladders no longer line up one to one - Codex now runs three Pro tiers - which makes Claude Code vs Codex more of a workflow decision than a price one.

How to Make Codex Limits Last Longer#

OpenAI's own list, plus the operational habits that go with it:

• Pick the model per task. Default to Sol or Luna and reserve Astra for work that needs it. The five-hour ranges above differ by an order of magnitude. If you are weighing Luna against Anthropic's new small model for the same worker slot, see Haiku 5.5 or GPT-6 Luna as a subagent worker.
• Keep prompts and sources tight. Provide only relevant files and narrow scope.
• Shrink AGENTS.md. Nest instruction files in subdirectories instead of loading one giant root file every turn.
• Disable MCP servers you are not using. Every server adds context to every message.
• Watch Fast mode. It consumes limits faster; use it when latency actually matters.
• Check the dashboard every week or two, as OpenAI suggests, so a weekly cap never surprises you mid-sprint. For process-level guardrails on long runs, see Codex CLI resource budgets.

FAQ#

How much does Codex cost?#

Codex is included in ChatGPT plans: Free ($0), Go ($8/month), Plus ($20/month), Pro 100 ($100/month), Pro 200 ($200/month), Pro 500 ($500/month, includes Astra Ultrafast), Business ($20/user/month billed annually, $25 monthly), and Enterprise/Edu (contact sales). You can also run Codex CLI, SDK, or IDE extension with an API key at API rates.

What are the Codex usage limits on Plus?#

OpenAI publishes ranges of local messages per five-hour period by model. On Plus that is 5-45 for GPT-6 Astra, 15-150 for GPT-6 Sol, and 350-3,000 for GPT-6 Luna, with weekly limits that may also apply. Actual usage depends on task size, context, and tools.

When do Codex usage limits reset?#

Plus and Standard Business usage is measured per five-hour period, and weekly limits can apply on top. As of September 29, 2026, Pro plans have no five-hour limit, so the weekly allowance is the one to watch. Your exact reset times are in the Codex usage dashboard. In the CLI, /status shows remaining limits and /usage shows daily, weekly, or cumulative activity.

Is there a Codex reset tracker?#

The official one is the usage dashboard at chatgpt.com/codex/settings/usage, plus /status and /usage in Codex CLI. You can also add a limits field to the CLI footer with /statusline.

Can I reset my Codex limits early?#

Only with an earned reset. Codex has granted banked rate-limit resets (for example through its June 2026 referral program), which you redeem via /usage. OpenAI Support does not reset usage limits on request.

What is Codex Pro 20x?#

Pro 20x was the old name for the $200/month ChatGPT Pro tier that unlocked roughly 20x Plus usage. OpenAI paused new sign-ups on September 10, 2026, then reopened the $200 tier on September 29 with a lower allowance for new subscriptions. Existing subscribers who meet the grandfathering criteria keep the old allowance through October 29, 2026.

What is ChatGPT Pro 500?#

Pro 500 is OpenAI's new $500/month Pro tier, announced September 29, 2026. It has the highest included usage of the three Pro plans and is the only one that includes Astra Ultrafast. Ultrafast draws on the plan's included usage first and then credits, and buyers of credits on Pro 100 or Pro 200 do not get Ultrafast access at launch.

Do I keep my Codex usage limits if I already pay for Pro $200?#

If your Pro 200 subscription was active at the eligibility cutoff, or during the seven days before it, you keep the previous allowance through October 29, 2026 while the subscription stays active. After that your plan moves to the lower allowance and the price stays $200/month. OpenAI says only affected users receive an email with the details.

What is Astra Ultrafast?#

Astra Ultrafast is a speed mode for GPT-6 Astra, included with Pro 500 and eligible Enterprise and Edu plans. OpenAI's docs say it uses included subscription usage at 8x the Standard rate and purchased credits at 6x, so it trades allowance for latency rather than adding capacity.

What does "Selected model is at capacity" mean in Codex?#

It means OpenAI's serving capacity for that model is saturated, not that you are out of quota. Switch to another model with /model, check status.openai.com, and retry. Upgrading your plan does not fix it.

What happens when I run out of Codex usage mid-task?#

The current turn can finish, subject to fair use. After that, wait for the reset, buy credits (Plus, Pro, or flexible-pricing workspaces), or run Codex with an API key billed at API rates.

Is Codex cheaper than Claude Code?#

Not as a straight comparison anymore. Codex now runs three Pro tiers ($100, $200, $500) against Anthropic's Max 5x and 20x from $100/month, and the $200 Codex allowance for new subscribers shrank on September 29. The real cost difference comes from which model you run, how much context each task carries, and whether your usage fits a weekly allowance or bills per token. Compare both in the AI coding tools pricing guide.

Sources#

Fetched September 28-29, 2026:

• OpenAI: ChatGPT Work and Codex pricing (fetched September 29, 2026; states Pro plans have no five-hour limit)
• OpenAI Help Center: About ChatGPT Pro tiers (fetched September 29, 2026)
• OpenAI: Speed and Ultrafast mode (fetched September 29, 2026)
• OpenAI: Tibo Sottiaux on X, September 29, 2026 usage change post
• OpenAI: Codex Originals form
• OpenAI: Codex CLI slash commands
• OpenAI: Codex models
• GitHub: openai/codex#41790 and openai/codex#43738
• Anthropic: Claude Max pricing and Using Claude Code with your Pro or Max plan
• OpenAI: Status page
• Hacker News: ChatGPT Pro 500 and Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription
• Reddit: r/codex on the September 29 change, r/Anthropic summary thread, and r/LocalLLaMA subsidy thread

Continue Reading#

• Claude Code Usage Limits in 2026: The Practical Playbook - the Anthropic side of the same question
• AI Coding Tools Pricing 2026 - Codex next to Claude Code, Cursor, and the rest
• Cheapest subagent model: Haiku 5.5 or GPT-6 Luna - Luna against Anthropic's same-price small model in the worker slot, with a worked subagent cost example
• Claude Code vs Codex - when the workflow matters more than the plan
• OpenAI Codex Guide - getting productive with Codex from zero
• Codex CLI Resource Budgets - guardrails for long-running sessions
• Sign in with ChatGPT: Run Coding Agents on Your Plan - how the plan-usage flow works and the per-app cap to set
• ChatGPT Plus vs Claude Pro for Developers - the $20 decision, with Plus Codex allowances next to Claude Pro's shared pool
• Codex 'gpt-5.5 Model Is Not Supported' Error: The Fix - what to change after GPT-5.5 left ChatGPT sign-in on October 14
• How to Use Codex Cloud Reusable Environments - publish one environment, then start isolated cloud tasks from web, desktop or mobile
• AI Coding Tool Plans and Usage Limits - every plan for 18 coding tools in the vendor's own words: prices, limit windows, overage and what changed, each value quoted
• Codex Reset: Banked vs Automatic vs Paid - the three reset types and how each moves your refresh date
• Codex CLI 0.164: /presets and Inline /model Flags - the latest stable release, with saved presets and inline model flags