Image: 9to5Mac / 9to5mac.com OpenAI Brings the 5-Hour Rolling Limit Back to ChatGPT Plus for Codex and Work
Starting August 25, Plus subscribers hit a rolling 5-hour usage cap on Codex and ChatGPT Work. Pro users are exempt, for now.
OpenAI removed the 5-hour rolling limit on Codex and ChatGPT Work for Plus subscribers back in July, after GPT-5.6 launched and capacity expanded. That relief window is now over. Starting August 25, the limit is back.
Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s head of Codex and ChatGPT, announced the change on the OpenAI developer forum. The explanation: reinstating the limit helps smooth demand on OpenAI’s compute infrastructure while keeping weekly allowances relatively generous. He also noted that many Plus users are newer or more casual, and without the rolling cap they sometimes burn through their entire weekly quota in a single session — then wonder why they’re locked out for the rest of the week.
How the limit works
Plus subscribers on Codex and ChatGPT Work now operate against two limits at once: a weekly total and a 5-hour rolling window. Once you hit the rolling cap, you wait for it to reset before you can access the remainder of your weekly allowance. You can also buy additional credits after hitting the limit.
Pro subscribers — the $100 and $200 per month tiers — are exempt from the 5-hour cap for now. Sottiaux said the window-based restrictions won’t apply to Pro for “the coming months,” though he left open that they may eventually.
Enterprise and Edu accounts use a separate credit-based system and aren’t affected by this change.
Context
This is at least the second time OpenAI has toggled the 5-hour limit on and off this year. The pattern reflects a real tension in subscription AI products: generous weekly quotas attract users, but concentrated usage creates compute spikes that strain infrastructure. A rolling window smooths that out at the cost of flexibility for heavy users.
For people who use Codex for long autonomous coding runs, the cap is genuinely limiting. A 5-hour window can fill up faster than it sounds if you’re running agents that spawn subagents or loop through a large task. The workaround — paying for Pro — costs $100 or $200 per month, which is a steep jump from Plus.
The full policy is documented in OpenAI’s help center article on using Codex with your ChatGPT plan.