// WHAT IT MEANS
One of your two Codex windows is empty. Plus accounts have a 5-hour window and a 7-day allowance; Pro ($100 / $200) accounts dropped the 5-hour gate in August 2026, so on Pro this message always means the weekly allowance. The message usually includes a "try again at" time.
Codex, ChatGPT Work, ChatGPT for Excel and Workspace Agents share this allowance, so heavy use in one shows up in all of them. Regular ChatGPT chat is metered separately.
// WHEN IT RESETS
5-hour window: 5 hours after your first message of the session. Weekly window: 7 days after your first request following the previous reset — it rolls, it is not your billing date, and renewing your subscription does not clear it.
Then there are fleet-wide resets. OpenAI's Codex lead announces them on X after outages, at user milestones and at launches — dozens of times since late 2025. The most recent is below; if it is from the last few hours, /status should already show 100%.
// WHAT TO DO NOW
- 01 Run /status in the CLI (or avatar → Usage on desktop) to see which bar is empty and the exact reset time.
- 02 Run /usage to check for banked resets: OpenAI sometimes issues reset credits you redeem yourself, and they expire 30 days after issue. Redeeming one refreshes both windows.
- 03 Plus and Pro can buy an instant reset from Usage settings — note it pulls next period's allowance forward rather than adding extra.
- 04 If usage is depleting faster than it should, OpenAI has fixed several metering bugs in 2026 and reset users as compensation; /status shows where usage went.
// DOES IT AFFECT MY WEEKLY ALLOWANCE?
If the 5-hour window is what emptied, your weekly allowance is untouched and the weekly reset date does not move. Redeeming a banked reset does move it — it refreshes both windows and restarts the 7-day count from that moment.
// ALSO APPEARS AS
- “You've hit your usage limit. Try again at 4:30 PM”
- “Rate limit reached”
- “Codex rate limit exceeded”
- “Weekly limit reached”