Understand and manage GitHub Actions cache storage limits and eviction behavior

Steps

1. The default per-repository cache storage limit is 10 GB at no cost; as of November 2025, enterprise, organization, and repository admins can configure this limit upward with additional storage billed beyond the included 10 GB
2. Configure cache policy limits in repository Settings > Actions > Caches (for repositories) or via the organization-level Actions settings; set both a size eviction limit (GB) and a retention limit (days)
3. The eviction interval was changed to hourly in 2025; when a repo's total cache size exceeds its limit, least-recently-used entries are evicted automatically within that hour
4. Caches that have not been accessed within the configured retention period (default 7 days) are also evicted regardless of total size; always re-save frequently used caches (e.g., node_modules) on each run to reset the access timestamp
5. Use actions/cache@v4 and set a restore-keys fallback list to allow partial cache hits when the exact key misses: restore-keys: | npm-deps- ; this returns the most recent matching prefix entry
6. List and manually delete caches via the REST API (GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/caches) or the GitHub CLI (gh cache list, gh cache delete) to reclaim space before the automated eviction runs