OpenAI makes ChatGPT Business Premium seats generally available with 5x usage and no five-hour cap

OpenAI has made Premium seats generally available inside ChatGPT Business, creating a higher-capacity option that companies can assign to their heaviest AI users rather than upgrading an entire workspace. According to a dev.to report on OpenAI's announcement, Premium seats deliver five times the usage capacity of a Standard seat and drop the five-hour usage cap entirely, while remaining part of the same centrally administered Business workspace.

What the new tier costs

Premium seats are priced at $125 per user per month on monthly billing, or $100 per user per month when paid annually. Standard seats stay at $25 per user per month, or $20 with annual billing. The dev.to report highlights an important nuance: the frequently cited $100 figure is the annual-billing rate, not the standard month-to-month price, which is $125.

A single workspace can hold both seat types at once, with OpenAI setting a combined ceiling of 200 paid seats per Business workspace. Administrators keep centralized control over billing, usage monitoring, and seat assignment, including the ability to reassign Premium seats as project needs shift.

Mixed seats change how companies buy capacity

The core shift is selective purchasing. Before this tier, a team with a handful of power users had limited ability to differentiate between routine and intensive usage inside one workspace — the realistic path was a broad plan change. Premium lets an administrator give a developer, analyst, or operations lead substantially more headroom while colleagues keep cheaper Standard seats.

OpenAI positions the tier specifically at demanding workloads, naming data analysis and coding with Codex as the target use cases. The removal of the five-hour limit matters most for people who lean on ChatGPT continuously during the workday; for occasional users doing drafting or research, the fivefold price gap makes a mixed configuration the more sensible comparison than a full workspace upgrade.

The mixed-seat model also creates a low-risk way to test the value. Companies can start with a small number of Premium assignments, measure whether the extra capacity actually speeds up or stabilizes heavy users' work, and expand only if the results justify the recurring cost.

The introductory credits offer is over

Early adopters had a short-lived incentive: OpenAI attached a promotional program offering $100 in workspace credits, or 2,500 credits, for each Premium seat added, capped at $500 across five seats. According to the dev.to report, an August 25, 2026 update confirmed general availability and stated that this credits offer has ended. Businesses evaluating the tier now should base their math on the ongoing seat prices alone, not the expired promotion.

What administrators should weigh

The practical questions are straightforward: which roles consistently hit or approach their current usage limits, whether the $100 annual-equivalent rate fits the expected value of the added capacity, and how many Premium seats make sense before the recurring cost outweighs the workflow benefit. Seat reassignment flexibility matters here too, since team needs change over the course of projects, and the 200-seat combined limit is a real planning boundary for larger deployments.

It is also worth being clear about what Premium does not do. The tier does not build automation or alter how a team works; it only removes a capacity constraint for people whose existing ChatGPT usage is already hitting limits. If nobody on the team is running into caps, the extra spend buys unused headroom.

Why it matters

This is a meaningful evolution in enterprise AI pricing. AI usage inside organizations is deeply uneven — a few engineers and analysts can consume orders of magnitude more than everyone else — and flat per-seat plans poorly match that reality. By letting buyers mix a $20 Standard seat with a $100 Premium seat in one workspace, OpenAI is moving toward usage-tiered seat pricing that mirrors how companies already buy software licenses for power users. For competitors building enterprise AI products, it sets a template for granular capacity pricing; for buyers, it shifts the decision from "which plan for the whole company" to "which individuals justify five times the price," with the 200-seat cap and reassignment rules as the main structural constraints.