OpenAI Reinstates 5-Hour Usage Limit for ChatGPT Plus Codex and Work Tiers

OpenAI is reinstating a five-hour usage limit for Codex and ChatGPT Work on its Plus subscription tier, effective August 25, 2026. The change reverses a temporary policy that had left Plus users subject only to a weekly usage cap for several weeks.

Thibault "Tibo" Sottiaux, OpenAI's engineering lead for Codex and ChatGPT, announced the reversal on X. According to Sottiaux, the five-hour cap serves two purposes: smoothing load on OpenAI's compute infrastructure so the company can keep weekly usage allowances generous, and preventing new or casual Plus users from unknowingly exhausting their entire weekly allotment in a single extended session.

"Users on the Plus plan are relatively casual and new users, but then also just accidentally eat through their whole week's usage and then are confused, making it not a great experience," Sottiaux wrote.

Under the restored system, once a Plus user hits either the five-hour or weekly limit, they can wait for the next reset cycle or purchase additional credits to continue working. OpenAI also says it occasionally issues free limit resets, and users can bank additional resets through promotions or referral programs.

Pro tiers unaffected — for now

OpenAI's Pro $100 and Pro $200 subscription plans will not have the five-hour limit re-enabled "for the upcoming months," according to Sottiaux. Enterprise and Edu accounts were not mentioned in the announcement; those tiers currently operate on a separate credit-based usage system rather than the time-window caps applied to Plus and Pro.

Background: the weekly-only experiment

OpenAI had lifted the five-hour limit for Codex and ChatGPT Work several weeks prior, leaving only the weekly cap in place. During that window, the company also issued several early resets of users' weekly usage to mark milestones, including surpassing another one million active users across the now-unified Codex and ChatGPT Work platforms. Sottiaux noted the reversal had been previously announced but postponed before now taking effect.

OpenAI has not disclosed specific numeric thresholds for either the five-hour or weekly limits, nor pricing for the additional credits users can purchase after hitting a cap.

What this means

This is a usage-policy adjustment, not a model or product change — no new capabilities, weights, or pricing tiers are introduced. The move signals that OpenAI's earlier weekly-only cap, while popular with power users, created enough compute-load and user-confusion problems that the company judged a rollback necessary for its highest-volume tier. Keeping Pro subscribers exempt suggests OpenAI is using pricing tiers as a lever to manage infrastructure strain: casual Plus users get tighter, more predictable rate limiting, while higher-paying Pro users retain more usage flexibility. For developers relying on Codex through a Plus subscription, this means budgeting work sessions around five-hour windows again rather than spreading usage freely across a full week.