Free ChatGPT and Codex Limit Resets: What They Are and How to Redeem One

You are blocked right now. Codex says the usage limit is reached, and somebody told you free resets exist. They do, but only one of the two kinds is yours to spend, and the well-known free grants from June have already expired.

Do this first: open the Codex app, click your profile, and look at the usage summary. If a reset is listed there, redeem it and get back to work. Everything below explains what you are looking at, and what to do if the list is empty.

This page is only about resets and credits. For how the five-hour and weekly windows work, and the settings that stop you hitting them, read Stop Hitting Codex Usage Limits.

Two different things are both called a reset

Most of the confusion online comes from mixing these up. They behave in opposite ways.

Banked resets are the useful kind. They sit on your account as an entitlement and clear your current window when you choose. OpenAI added rate-limit reset banking on June 11, 2026, and the plan documentation is Using Codex with your ChatGPT plan. Reports at launch put the rollout on the paid plans, Go, Plus, Pro and Business, each starting with one free reset. OpenAI’s help page does not confirm that launch list, so treat it as report-sourced and check your own account. What the page does confirm is the ongoing mechanism: “For some Plus and Pro promotions, a successful referral can add a banked Codex rate-limit reset.” The panel is named Usage limit resets in the Codex app, which is how users refer to it in bug reports (openai/codex #37928). OpenAI describes the same control as the profile-menu “usage summary showing the available reset count, such as 1 reset available”.

What a redemption actually does, and why the timing matters. This is the part almost nobody explains. Per OpenAI: “Using a full banked reset resets both your 5-hour and weekly usage windows. As a result, your weekly reset date will move to roughly seven days after you redeem it.”

Read that twice before you spend one. A reset is not just a refill. It re-anchors your weekly window to the moment you redeem. Burn a reset on a Friday night to finish one task and your weekly window now rolls over on Friday nights from then on. If your work is bursty on a predictable day, redeem at the start of that burst, not at the end of an unrelated one.

Milestone resets are goodwill. Thibault Sottiaux, the engineering lead for Codex at OpenAI, has announced several of them on the OpenAI developer forum, including August 9 and August 10, 2026, and another around August 13 when Codex passed 15 million users. These are applied automatically to paid plans. You cannot save one, request one, or predict the next one. If you were at 90% remaining when it landed, you got almost nothing from it.

Some users report receiving a milestone reset when they expected a bankable one, and the two do not reconcile (openai/codex #33513). Treat milestone resets as weather, not as capacity you can plan around.

The June free grants are gone

Be clear about this, because a lot of pages still describe them as live.

• Eligible paid subscribers, reported as Go, Plus, Pro and Business, received one complimentary banked reset when the feature launched on June 11, 2026.
• A referral window ran for roughly two weeks after launch. Inviting a colleague granted a banked reset to both people once the invitee sent their first Codex message. This is community-reported; we could not confirm the exact closing date from an OpenAI page.
• Banked resets expire 30 days after they are granted. The Codex app’s own banner says so: “You were granted a rate limit reset that will expire in 30 days” (openai/codex #37396).

Thirty days from June 11 is July 11. Today is August 20, 2026. A reset you were granted at launch or through the June referral window has already expired. If a blog or video is telling you to go claim the launch reset, it is out of date. Anything you hold now came from a later grant.

How to earn one now

Referral invitations are the documented ongoing path. OpenAI states that eligible users see them in the profile menu: personal plan users may see Invite a friend, and eligible Business workspace members may see Invite a coworker. The reward is offer-dependent, and OpenAI ties banked resets specifically to “some Plus and Pro promotions”, so an invite does not always pay a reset. The invitation dialog shows the current reward, the invite limit, the expiry, and any recipient requirement before you send it. Read it rather than assuming the June terms still apply.

How to check whether you hold one

1. Open the Codex app on macOS or Windows and open the profile menu.
2. Find the Usage limit resets section in the usage summary.
3. Read the count and the expiry date. If a reset is available, the redeem control is in that same section.

Two things go wrong here.

The section fails to load. Users have reported the panel showing “Couldn’t load usage limit resets” with only a Retry button, hiding a reset that the account actually holds (openai/codex #37928, reported August 11, 2026). If you see the error, retry, then restart the app. Do not assume the balance is zero.

You are on Linux, or you are not at your desktop. The redemption surface is the Codex app, and the app does not ship for Linux. A CLI request was filed on June 12, 2026, noting that Codex CLI 0.139.0 had no way to view or redeem banked resets (openai/codex #27934); it was closed the same day as a duplicate, not as shipped, and a comment on it dated August 12, 2026 still says “there appears to be no authenticated web or CLI redemption path”. A forum thread from June 14 asking the same question drew no official answer. We could not verify that a supported CLI or web redemption path has shipped since, and the current CLI release is 0.148.0 (2026-08-18). If you have seen a redeem option under /usage in the CLI, that is newer than anything we can confirm.

One correction worth making, because it circulates widely: the claim that reset banking works in the CLI from v0.135 onward comes from aggregator blogs, not from OpenAI. The primary evidence points the other way.

A community CLI tool, codex-reset, exists to redeem a banked reset without the app UI. It is unaffiliated with OpenAI and it operates on your account session, so read the source before running it and understand that it is not a supported path.

Redeem it at the right moment

A banked reset is one clean refill of your window. Its value depends entirely on when you spend it.

1. Redeem only when the window is actually empty. A reset refills the window to full, so redeeming with a third still left throws that third away.
2. Spend it on a deadline, not on a Tuesday. The right moment is a deploy that has to ship tonight. Waiting five hours costs nothing when nothing is waiting on you.
3. Watch the expiry date, not the balance. An unredeemed reset at day 29 is worth more spent on mediocre work than lost at day 30. There is an open request to auto-redeem before expiry (openai/codex #32586); it is not implemented.
4. Screenshot the panel when you see a reset. Multiple users report resets vanishing from their account without ever being applied (#36419, #33118). Evidence helps if you contact support.
5. Clear context before you redeem. A fresh window spent re-sending a bloated conversation buys you very little. Run /clear first.

When you hold no reset

This is the common case. Four options, in order of what they cost you.

Plan prices on the ChatGPT pricing page, read on 2026-08-19, are Free at $0, Go at $8, Plus at $20, Pro at $100 for the 5x tier or $200 for the 20x tier, and Business at $20 per user per month billed annually, $25 billed monthly. Credits are bought under Settings, then Usage. You cannot buy a banked reset. Resets come from grants only.

If you overflow every week, credits are a patch and the habits are the fix. The two that pay immediately: run /clear between unrelated tasks, and plan in one session then implement in a fresh one. Both are covered in detail in the limits guide.

How to read reset rumors

This topic moves fast and most of what you will read is secondhand. A short filter:

• If a page describes the launch reset or the June referral offer as available, it is stale. Both are past their 30-day window.
• If a post promises a specific date for the next milestone reset, it is guessing. Those announcements come without notice.
• If a tool promises unlimited resets, it is either an API key in disguise or something that will get your account flagged.
• Check the Codex app panel and the official changelog before you believe a claim about a new reset mechanic.

The five-minute version

1. Open the Codex app profile menu and read Usage limit resets.
2. If the panel errors, retry and restart before concluding you have none.
3. Redeem only against a real deadline, or on the day before expiry.
4. If you have none, wait out the five-hour window and use the time to cut context burn.
5. Ignore anything describing the June grants as current. They expired in July.

See Also

• Stop Hitting Codex Usage Limits (2026): Resets, Free Tiers and Token Habits. The full guide to how the windows work and the config that stretches a $20 plan.
• OpenClaw Token Resets Every 8 Hours: What Actually Resets. The other thing people call a reset. That one is OAuth expiry, not usage.
• Is Codex Fast Mode Worth It?. What fast mode costs you against your window.
• Subscription Agent Harness Rules for Claude and ChatGPT. What plan terms allow when you run agents on a subscription.