OpenAI restores 5-hour cap for ChatGPT Plus users
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- OpenAI will restore a five-hour usage limit on Codex and ChatGPT Work for Plus subscribers starting the 25th, reversing a several-week window where only the weekly cap applied.
- Thibault "Tibo" Sottiaux, OpenAI's engineering lead for Codex and ChatGPT, announced the change on X, saying the five-hour cap smooths compute load and prevents casual Plus users from accidentally burning through their weekly allowance.
- During the unlimited stretch, OpenAI reset weekly usage early multiple times to celebrate milestones, including adding another million active users across the now-unified Codex and ChatGPT platforms.
- Pro $100 and Pro $200 subscriptions will remain exempt from the five-hour cap "for the upcoming months," keeping higher tiers unrestricted.
- After hitting either limit, Plus subscribers can wait for reset, purchase additional credits, or earn banked resets via promotions and referrals; OpenAI also occasionally grants free resets.
- Enterprise and Edu accounts were not addressed in the announcement and continue to operate on a separate credit-based system.
Why it matters: Plus subscribers lose the brief weekly-only freedom and can now hit a cap within a single five-hour session, though they retain the ability to buy credits or earn banked resets through referrals. Pro $100 and $200 tiers keep unrestricted access, preserving OpenAI's upsell path for heavier users. The stated rationale — compute load smoothing — suggests infrastructure constraints, not just user confusion, drove the reversal.
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