Codex Free Reset and Banked Reset (2026): Dates and Expiry

Bottom Line

• Last Codex reset: a banked reset on 1 November 2026, announced by Codex lead Thibault Sottiaux as “Banked 2/2”. It followed “Banked 1/2” on 31 October. Both were loaded into paid accounts.
• Expiry: banked resets last 30 days. The 31 October and 1 November grants expire about 30 November and 1 December. Read the exact date in your own panel.
• No reset has landed between 2 and 5 November. The 28-day “ship one thing or ship a reset” series that ran 4 October to 1 November is over.
• You cannot ask for a free reset. You can redeem one you were granted, earn one through a referral promotion, or buy a paid instant reset. The three are different things, explained below.
• Where to look: Codex app, profile menu, Usage limit resets. If it says “Couldn’t load usage limit resets”, retry before you assume zero.

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.

Last Codex reset and recent history

Dates below are Pacific time. October and November rows are taken from the public reset trackers (resetbeacon, codex-reset.com, codex-resets.net, codexresets.com), read on 5 November 2026, and each links the X post it rests on. The trackers disagree on four late-October dates; those rows say so.

Date (2026)	Type	Who got it	Why	Source
November 1	Banked	Paid plans	”Day 28 / Banked 2/2”, the last day of the 28-day series	Tibo on X
October 31	Banked	Paid plans	”Banked 1/2”	Tibo on X
October 27	Automatic	Everyone	”And it’s done”	Tibo on X
October 25	Automatic	Everyone	”Day 21 … today is a reset”; one tracker lists it as a hint, not a reset	Tibo on X
October 24	Automatic	Everyone	”It is all propagated”	Tibo on X
October 22-23	Disputed	Everyone	Two “lands tomorrow” posts; three trackers count them, one marks them missed	Oct 21 post, Oct 22 post
October 19	Automatic	Everyone	”Day 15 … and reset”	Tibo on X
October 17	Automatic	Everyone	”Done”	Tibo on X
October 14	Automatic	Everyone	”Done and dusted”	Tibo on X
October 12	Automatic	Everyone	”It’s done”	Tibo on X
October 10	Automatic	Everyone	”Put the reset in the bag”	Tibo on X
October 7	Banked	Paid plans	40 million active users across Codex and ChatGPT Work	Tibo on X
October 6	Automatic	Everyone	Community vote in the 28-day series	Tibo on X
October 2	Automatic	Everyone	”Reset all propagated”	Tibo on X
September 22	Banked	Plus, Pro, Business	GPT-6 Sol and Luna launch	Tibo on X, 9to5Mac
September 12	Automatic	Paid plans	Quality fixes for Astra users	Tibo on X
September 7-8	Automatic	Plus, Pro, Business	Astra rollout	Tibo on X
September 3-5	Banked	Plus, Pro, Business	Waiting for GPT-6 Astra access	OpenAI help
August 31	Automatic	Paid plans	25 million active users	Tibo on X
August 21	Banked	Codex and ChatGPT Work users	20 million active users	Tibo on X

Banked means the reset waits in your account until you redeem it, for 30 days. Automatic means your bar refilled on the day, and there is nothing to redeem. The 7 October grant expired about 6 November. The 31 October and 1 November grants expire about 30 November and 1 December. The September grants are gone.

October 2026 was not normal. On 4 October Tibo posted that for 28 days Codex would “either ship one thing … or ship a full reset” each day. That is why October has ten or more reset rows and why trackers disagree on some of them: several days had a promise post and a done post hours apart, and one tracker counts the promise while another waits for the confirmation. The series ended with the two banked resets on 31 October and 1 November. Do not expect that cadence to continue. Between 2 and 5 November nothing reset.

Two other changes from the same weeks, neither of them a reset. On 29 October OpenAI doubled all usage limits for Pro 100, Pro 200, Pro 500 and Business Premium, per Tibo’s post; a planned Pro 200 cut was reversed in the same move, per SmartScope and Neoteo. On 3 November a Pro-only post said the top tier is now “50X”. Neither post says whether the increase is permanent. If your bar lasts longer than it did in September, this is why, not a reset.

Will Codex reset again soon? Nobody outside OpenAI knows. Thibault Sottiaux (“Tibo”), who leads Codex, announces most resets on X without warning. The four trackers above log them and disagree with each other on about one row in five; between them they count 55 to 73 resets since September 2025. Treat any forecast of the next date as a guess.

Two different things are both called a reset

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

	Banked reset	Milestone reset
Who controls it	You	OpenAI
When it applies	When you redeem it	The moment it is granted
Where you see it	Usage limit resets, in the Codex app profile menu	Nowhere. Your bar refills
Expires	Yes, 30 days from the grant	Not applicable
Can it be wasted	Only by letting it expire	Yes, if your window was already full

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.

September 2026: the Astra banked resets

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on September 3, 2026, and rolled it out in phases. Per OpenAI’s help article How banked Codex resets work, paid accounts got banked resets during the wait:

• Existing Plus, Pro and Business users in good standing got one banked reset on September 3 and one on September 4.
• New Plus, Pro and Business accounts created before a cutoff time on those days also qualified (10 PM PT on September 3, 8 PM PT on September 4).
• When the rollout finished, reports say every Plus, Pro and Business user got one more full banked reset at the end of September 5.
• On September 7, OpenAI applied an automatic reset to eligible Plus, Pro and Business limits. That one was a milestone-style reset. It did not add a saved reset to your panel.

The September 22 Sol and Luna grant came on top of these. All of the September grants passed their 30-day expiry in October. If your panel is empty now, you spent the October and November grants, they expired, or the panel failed to load (see below). Check the expiry date in your own panel.

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. 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, most likely the September Astra grants.

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.

Couldn’t load usage limit resets

This error appears in the Usage limit resets section of the Codex app profile menu. It shows only a Retry button. It does not mean you have zero resets. Users report that the error hides resets the account holds (openai/codex #37928, reported August 11, 2026).

1. Click Retry.
2. Quit and restart the Codex app.
3. Sign out and sign back in.
4. If the error stays, take a screenshot and contact OpenAI support. Do not buy a paid reset until you know your banked balance.

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. You see “Couldn’t load usage limit resets”. Follow the steps in the section above. 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.

Paid instant resets

You can now buy a reset. OpenAI documents this in Paid weekly Work and Codex rate limit resets. A paid reset is not a banked reset:

• It applies immediately after checkout. You cannot save it for later.
• It pulls your normal weekly allowance forward. It does not add extra usage on top.
• Your next automatic weekly reset moves to 7 days after your first Work or Codex request once the reset applies.
• It is for eligible ChatGPT Plus and Pro personal accounts, on ChatGPT web and the Codex desktop app. Buy it from the desktop Usage settings.
• OpenAI generally does not refund reset purchases.

OpenAI sells instant resets; the price is shown at checkout and on the help page. Because a paid reset pulls next week forward, buy one only for a real deadline. Spend a banked reset first if you hold one.

When you hold no reset

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

Option	Cost	Best for
Wait for the rolling window	Free, five hours	Anything without a deadline
Cut token burn so the window lasts	Free, ten minutes	The actual fix for repeat offenders
Buy an instant reset	Paid, Plus and Pro only. Pulls next week’s allowance forward	A deadline today when you hold no banked reset
Buy credits	Metered on top of your plan. OpenAI does not publish a flat credit rate	Occasional overflow you can predict
Sign in with an API key	Standard API rates	Automated or heavy use, outside plan limits
Upgrade	Pro from $100 per month	Overflow every single week

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. Banked resets come from grants only. A paid instant reset is a different product (see above).

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 page says you cannot buy a reset, it is older than OpenAI’s paid instant reset.
• 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 it says “Couldn’t load usage limit resets”, 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. Paid accounts got banked resets on October 7, October 31 and November 1, 2026. The September grants expired in October; the June grants expired in July.
6. A paid instant reset applies at once and pulls next week forward. Buy one only for a deadline.

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.