AI Usage Limits by Plan (September 2026): ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot on One Page

AI usage limits by plan: the short answer

As of September 2026, every major AI vendor meters paid plans on a rolling 5-hour window with a weekly cap on top, and only one of them publishes a real number. OpenAI prints estimates (10 to 100 GPT-5.6 Sol messages per 5 hours on Plus, 200 GPT-6 Pro messages a week on Pro $200). Anthropic prints multipliers (Pro is at least 5x Free, Max is 5x or 20x Pro). Google prints multipliers (AI Pro is 4x Free, Ultra is 5x or 20x Pro). Microsoft prints "usage limits apply" and a table of words like "extensive use." Every cell below comes from a vendor page I read on September 21, 2026 — except the Microsoft rows, which carry forward from September 15 because Microsoft's commercial pages did not render to a plain fetch this week — and where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says "not published."

This page exists because the question "what are the usage limits" has four different answers depending on the logo, and each vendor only publishes its own. The detailed posts on ChatGPT usage limits, Codex usage limits, and Claude usage limits go deep on each meter. This is the table that puts them side by side.

Every plan, every vendor, one table

Last verified: October 5, 2026. This page is re-checked every Monday against the vendor pages listed in each section below. Nothing changed this week across Anthropic's pricing page, Google's AI plans and Gemini subscription pages, OpenAI's Codex pricing page, or Microsoft's Copilot Business page. Every price and every published limit above matched on re-read, including the Microsoft rows ($18 a user a month yearly, down from $21; $25.20 monthly; $23.50 and $32 for the bundled suites), which had carried forward from September 15 until this read.

One genuine addition from the September 21 re-read, on the Anthropic side: "Claude for Microsoft Outlook" is now its own row in Anthropic's plan comparison, separate from "Claude for Microsoft 365" — No on Free, Yes on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. Microsoft's marketplace carries the matching add-in listing, "currently in beta on all paid Claude plans." The detail is on Claude for Outlook. It does not change any usage number in the table above, because Anthropic publishes none for it.

How OpenAI meters ChatGPT

OpenAI is the only vendor that prints numbers, and it prints them for three separate meters. Plain text chat carries no cap on any ChatGPT plan beyond abuse guardrails. Reasoning with GPT-5.6 Sol has a limit OpenAI doesn't quantify on Plus, and when you hit it ChatGPT may continue on another model. GPT-6 Pro in Chat has hard weekly allowances (200 on Pro $200, 50 on Pro $100, 15 a month on a Business Standard seat, 50 a week on Premium). The full plan-by-plan version is on ChatGPT usage limits, and the seat math is on ChatGPT Business pricing.

How OpenAI meters Codex

ChatGPT Work and Codex share one agentic allowance, and OpenAI publishes it as estimated local messages per 5-hour window by model: 15 to 160 with GPT-6.1 Sol and 15 to 150 with GPT-6 Sol on Plus, 5 to 45 with GPT-6 Astra, 350 to 3,000 with GPT-6 Luna (OpenAI's pricing doc as read September 30, 2026; Standard Business seats get the same estimates as Plus). Business Premium gets five times Standard with no 5-hour limit, Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit at all, and "weekly limits may also apply." Pro now comes at $100, $200 or $500, and the $500 plan is the only self-serve one with GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast, which burns included usage at 8x the Standard-speed rate (Fast mode is 2.5x). Image generation burns the allowance 3 to 5x faster, cloud tasks can use more, and an active turn is allowed to finish when you hit the wall. Everything that quietly drains it is on Codex usage limits.

How Anthropic meters Claude

Anthropic publishes no message count for any plan and says so plainly: "there's no fixed message count." Every plan resets on a rolling 5-hour session window, paid plans add a weekly limit that resets at a fixed time assigned to your account, and claude.ai, Desktop, Claude Code, and Cowork all draw from one pool. What Anthropic does publish is relative: Pro is at least 5x Free per session, Max is 5x or 20x Pro, Team Standard seats are 1.25x Pro and Premium seats are 6.25x Pro. Paid plans can turn on usage credits at API rates, with bundles from $50 (billed $45) to $1,000 (billed $700). The mechanism, and why the missing number is the honest answer, is on Claude usage limits; the seat decision is on the Claude Team plan.

How Google meters Gemini

Since May 17, 2026, Gemini has charged each prompt by how much compute it takes, which depends on the prompt, the model and features, and how long the chat has run, and the allowance refreshes every 5 hours until a weekly limit stops it. Google publishes multipliers, not counts: AI Plus is 2x Free, AI Pro is 4x Free, AI Ultra is 5x or 20x Pro. Generating images or video, Deep Research, the Pro model and Deep Think are the expensive requests; a subscriber who runs out drops to Flash-Lite or buys AI credits. The one hard number Google gives is context: 32K tokens on the free tier, 128K on AI Plus, 1M on AI Pro and Ultra. The by-plan detail is on Gemini usage limits.

How Microsoft meters Copilot

Microsoft publishes the least. The Microsoft 365 Copilot Business add-on ($18 a user a month on the current promo, $21 list) carries no per-user prompt count on its pricing page; the metered part is agents, which draw Copilot Credits that admins cap per user per month, resetting on the first. Copilot Chat comes free with eligible Microsoft 365 plans and is "subject to service capacity." On the consumer side, Microsoft's own limits page lists Copilot chat as "extensive use" on Personal ($9.99), Family ($12.99), Premium ($19.99), and Pro ($99.99), with Voice and Vision graded "standard," "more," and "highest." No numbers anywhere. If your team lives in Word and Excel, that vagueness is a feature; if you want to budget usage, it's a problem.

Who publishes what: the disclosure scorecard

The table above answers "what do I get." This one answers the question underneath it: how much each vendor is willing to tell you. Two vendors without a row above, x.ai and Cursor, are here too, because they publish even less than Microsoft.

Read down the "names the window" column and the category splits cleanly. The three largest vendors agree on a five-hour clock and a weekly ceiling above it, and disagree only on whether to print a number inside it. Microsoft, Cursor and x.ai don't name a clock at all, which means a heavy week on those tools gives you nothing to plan the next one against except your own usage screen.

Which plan to buy, by owner profile

Solo operator

Start at $20 and pick by the meter that will actually bind you. If your day is chat and documents, ChatGPT Plus gives you unlimited text and a Work allowance; Claude Pro gives you a 5-hour session that resets all day and includes Claude Code. If you're running an agent for hours, the $100 tier is where the real usage is: ChatGPT Pro $100 (5x) or Claude Max 5x. I'd skip $200 tiers until a $100 tier has locked you out twice in one week. ChatGPT Pro $200 is buyable again as of September 29, but new subscribers get a smaller allowance than it used to carry.

5-person team

Buy Standard seats for everyone and one Premium seat for whoever runs the agents. On ChatGPT Business that's 4 x $20 plus 1 x $100, or $180 a month billed annually, and the Premium seat has no 5-hour limit. On Claude Team it's the same $180 with the Premium seat at 6.25x Pro per session, and every seat's limit is per member, so one heavy user can't drain the others. Turn on workspace credits with a monthly cap before anyone hits a wall. Google AI Pro at $19.99 a head is cheaper, but it's a personal-account plan; for a business account you're looking at Workspace or Gemini Enterprise, where no limit is published.

20-person team

Seat-type mix is the whole decision. Run 30 days on Standard seats, read the usage analytics, then move the three or four people who hit limits to Premium. At 16 Standard plus 4 Premium, both ChatGPT Business and Claude Team land at $720 a month billed annually. If the team is already on Microsoft 365 Business Standard, the Copilot bundle at $23.50 a user is the cheapest all-in number on this page, but you're trading a published limit for "usage limits apply." The rule I'd set on day one, on any vendor: a monthly credit cap per seat type, so the first surprise is a notification and not an invoice.

Sources

Every cell comes from the vendor's own page. Read dates are the latest read behind the numbers on this page.

• OpenAI: ChatGPT pricing (read September 15, 2026); Codex pricing (read September 21, 28 and 29, 2026); ChatGPT Business pricing (read September 15, 2026); OpenAI Help articles 20001354 (GPT-6 Pro allowances), 12003714 (Business seats), 11481834 (credit rate card), 9793128 (Pro tiers), 6950777 (Plus price) (all read September 15, 2026; 20001354, 12003714 and 9793128 re-read September 29, 2026)
• Anthropic: Claude pricing (read September 21, 2026); Claude Help articles 8325606 (Pro), 11049741 (Max), 9266767 (Team), 11647753 (usage and length limits), 14246112 (usage-credit bundles) (read September 15, 2026)
• Google: Gemini subscriptions (read September 21, 2026); Gemini Apps Help 16275805 and 17004136 (read September 15, 2026); Google Workspace pricing (read September 15, 2026)
• Microsoft: Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing and the individuals pricing page; Microsoft Support, AI credits and limits for Microsoft 365 subscriptions; Microsoft Learn, Copilot usage-based billing and Microsoft 365 Copilot overview (all read September 15, 2026)
• Cursor: Cursor pricing (read September 20, 2026)
• x.ai: x.ai pricing (read September 21 and 27, 2026); grok.com/plans (read September 27, 2026)