OpenAI Adds $125 ChatGPT Premium Business Tier

OpenAI has expanded its ChatGPT Business offering by introducing a new Premium seat tier designed for high-intensity users. Positioned between the entry-level Standard plan and custom-priced Enterprise contracts, Premium seats cost $125 per user monthly, or $100 when billed annually. Meanwhile, Standard seats remain priced at $25 per month, or $20 annually, following a price cut from $30 in April 2026. Administrators can mix both seat types within a single workspace to optimize their software spend.

The primary draw of the Premium tier is a fivefold increase in usage capacity compared to Standard seats, alongside the complete removal of the five-hour rolling usage cap. For practitioners running complex agentic workloads, Codex programming jobs, or Deep Research queries, this change prevents mid-task interruptions. Previously, long-running background tasks could trigger the rolling limit and disrupt workflows. Premium users also benefit from weekly capacity resets and the ability to top up exhausted allotments using centrally managed workspace credits.

To encourage early adoption, OpenAI offered a promotion for the first 10,000 eligible Business customers, providing $100 in workspace credits per Premium seat up to a maximum of five seats, or $500. The waitlist for this promotion closed on August 20. Because Premium does not gate features like GPTs, Projects, Apps, Company Knowledge, or Codex, it functions strictly as a capacity upgrade. For IT administrators and team leaders, this structure shifts AI budgeting into a mix of fixed seat costs and variable capacity, allowing them to target budget increases specifically at the engineers and operators who actively exhaust daily limits.