OpenAI’s August announcement brought back a rolling five-hour usage cap for Codex on ChatGPT Plus.
Tibo Sottiaux, OpenAI’s engineering lead for ChatGPT and Codex, posted on X that a five-hour usage cap is returning for Plus subscribers. It applies across Codex and ChatGPT Work, OpenAI’s work-focused mode that shares the same usage pool. The cap throttles how much you can use within any rolling five-hour window, separate from your normal weekly allowance.
What’s actually changing
During the suspension, Plus subscribers faced a weekly usage allowance that resets on a fixed schedule. Once the five-hour cap returns, Plus users will hit two ceilings instead of one. You can burn through your five-hour allotment well before your week’s allowance runs out, and then have to wait out that shorter window before continuing.
Sottiaux said Pro subscribers on the $100 and $200 monthly tiers would remain exempt from the five-hour cap “for the upcoming months.” That announcement kept their weekly allowance in place.
Sottiaux gave two reasons for bringing the cap back. First, spreading usage across five-hour windows helps OpenAI manage how much server capacity everyone’s requests draw on at once, without having to shrink the weekly allowance for everyone. Second, he said Plus users skew toward newer, more casual accounts that sometimes burn through an entire week’s allowance in one sitting, then get confused when they’re locked out for days. The five-hour cap is meant to catch that earlier, in a smaller, faster-resetting window.
9to5Mac also reported the returning cap. Sottiaux attributed it to capacity management and more gradual usage by newer Plus accounts.
This is a reversal, not a new policy
OpenAI suspended the same cap in July, after Codex and ChatGPT Work crossed 9 million active users. That suspension ran for roughly six weeks, alongside repeated weekly-allowance resets while OpenAI fixed bugs that made its GPT-5.6 Sol model burn through usage faster than intended.
Sottiaux’s post frames this as bringing the cap “back,” not introducing something new. If you started using Codex during that suspension, this will be the first time you’ve run into the five-hour wall at all.
What builders should do next
Don’t guess at how much the five-hour cap will actually cost you. Track a representative task, such as updating tests for one app request handler, against your displayed limits. Track two things: how much of the five-hour window it consumes, and how much of your weekly allowance is left afterward.
If that one task already eats a large share of both, that’s a concrete signal your workload doesn’t fit comfortably inside Plus’s cap, not a guess. Use OpenAI’s Codex rate card for credit billing rates. Check current included limits separately in your usage dashboard or with /status in Codex CLI before budgeting.
Where this fits
OpenAI is restoring a cap for its cheapest paid tier while Anthropic extends Claude Code’s larger limits through the end of August. These historical announcements do not establish your current subscription limits. Track your own usage against the task you actually need done, not the announcement of the week.
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