"GitHub Copilot Business is active for your account" how long until this goes away after removal?

[VictorioBerra]

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Copilot Feature Area

Copilot Enterprise

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TL;DR: Business removed my copilot seat, how long does it take to reflect this? I still see "GitHub Copilot Business is active for your account" along with all copilot features disabled and 0% premium requests.

I have asked my organization to remove my Copilot seat as they gave me a license and without any confirmation my personal paid license was revoked and I was refunded.

Now my organization has disabled many copilot features I was using and frequently hit limits which blocks my own personal use.

Due to GH not supporting multiple licenses, I am forced to create a new GH account for my org, and have them cancel my seat and apply it to this new account.

[Ariel-Canseco]

When a GitHub organization removes or changes a GitHub Copilot Business/Enterprise license, the update is usually processed almost immediately at the organization level, but it may take some time (sometimes several hours) for all account indicators to fully synchronize.

What you're experiencing is typically caused by one of the following:

License state desynchronization
GitHub may still display “Copilot Business is active for your account” while backend permissions are already revoked.

Session caching
Logging out of GitHub and signing back in (or clearing browser cache) often forces the UI to refresh license status.

Copilot entitlement precedence
If your personal Copilot subscription was refunded when the organization assigned a Business license, removing the Business license does not automatically restore the personal subscription. GitHub does not currently support stacking or dual licensing on a single account.

Billing system delay
In some cases, license revocation can take up to 24 hours to fully propagate across all GitHub services.

Recommended Steps

Log out and log back in.

Check https://github.com/settings/copilot
directly.

Verify with your organization owner that the seat was actually removed (not just disabled).

Wait up to 24 hours for synchronization.

If the issue persists beyond that, contact GitHub Support and reference the billing change.

Important Note

GitHub currently does not support multiple active Copilot licenses (personal + organization) on the same account. If you need separation between organizational and personal usage limits, using a dedicated account for your organization may be the cleanest long-term solution.

This behavior is related more to license propagation and entitlement syncing rather than a technical failure of Copilot itself.

[VictorioBerra]

Relogging did not fix the issue. /settings/copilot/features still displays "GitHub Copilot Business is active for your account".

I will check back here tomorrow morning and report if it still has not been released.

[PSMatheus01]

The "GitHub Copilot Business is active for your account" banner is known to be sticky. Based on multiple reports and my own experience, here's what actually happens behind the scenes:

When an organization removes your Copilot Business seat, the entitlement revocation happens almost immediately on the backend (API-level), but the UI state on /settings/copilot relies on a cached license object that refreshes on its own cycle. This is not a simple browser cache issue — it's server-side.

Typical Timeline

• API-level access revocation: Usually immediate to ~1 hour.
• UI banner and /settings/copilot/features update: Can take up to 24–48 hours in practice. Some users have reported it lingering for up to 72 hours in edge cases.

You can verify whether the seat is actually removed right now by hitting the API directly:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_PAT" \
     -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
     https://api.github.com/copilot_internal/v2/token

If the seat is truly removed, this will return a 404 or an error indicating no active Copilot subscription, even if the UI still shows the banner. That confirms it's purely a UI propagation delay.

Regarding your bigger problem — the dual license situation

You're right that GitHub does not support stacking a personal subscription on top of a Business seat on the same account. But before committing to maintaining two separate GitHub accounts long-term (which creates friction with contributions, commit history, and identity), consider this alternative:

Once the Business license fully detaches, you can re-subscribe to Copilot Pro on your original account. Then ask your org to assign the Business seat to a dedicated org-only account. This way your personal account keeps full Copilot access under your own control, with your own limits, and your commit graph and identity stay unified.

If the banner hasn't cleared after 48 hours, open a ticket with GitHub Support referencing the seat removal date — they can force-clear the entitlement cache on their end.

[VictorioBerra]

Thank you for your reply, just tried this morning, and I still am unable to apply my own license. I did try logging out and back in again. I guess I will wait up to 72 hours...

CURL command with PAT returned curl : {"message":"Not Found","documentation_url":"https://docs.github.com/rest","status":"404"}

Any way for me to sign up via API calls?

[PSMatheus01]

Good news actually — that 404 confirms exactly what we expected. The backend already removed your Business seat, so it's purely the UI being slow to catch up.

Unfortunately there's no way to subscribe to Copilot Pro via API — it's UI-only. You'd do it at https://github.com/github-copilot/signup, but the problem is that page probably won't let you subscribe while the "Business is active" banner is still showing.

Since you're past 24 hours and the API already confirms the seat is gone, I'd skip waiting for 72 hours and just open a support ticket now at https://support.github.com. Tell them the Business seat was removed, the API returns 404 confirming it, but the UI still shows the Business banner and is blocking you from subscribing to a personal plan. They can force-clear the cached entitlement on their end — should be a quick fix once a support agent gets to it.

That'll be faster than waiting and hoping the UI catches up on its own.

[VictorioBerra]

ticket/personal/0/4109429 created. Thanks!

[codazzo]

What a horrendous way to rollout this "feature" - forcing people into org-wide plans without them ever accepting an invitation.

This has been reported several times already:
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/186819
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185343
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185884

I opened a support ticket, like I can only imagine several other people also have, and have so far received no reply.