Claude Code Weekly Limits +50%: Promo Extended Through August 19, 2026
Anthropic's +50% Claude Code weekly-limits promo is still live. Anthropic has extended it twice, and its support doc now runs the window through August 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT. It covers Pro, Max, and Team plans plus legacy seat-based Enterprise, across the CLI, IDE extensions, desktop, and web.
Update (July 25, 2026): Anthropic has now extended this promotion twice. Anthropic's own support article -- reached from Anthropic's short link clau.de/cc-50-promo and retitled "Claude Code May-August 2026 weekly limits promotion" -- states the +50% Claude Code weekly-limit lift now runs through August 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT. The earlier July 13 and July 19 dates are both superseded. Per that doc the increase applies "everywhere you use it: the CLI, IDE extensions, desktop, and the web", eligibility is Pro, Max, and Team plans plus legacy seat-based users on Enterprise plans, and Free plans and consumption-based Enterprise seats are excluded. Five-hour usage limits are explicitly not affected by this promotion. No action is required -- it applies automatically, and when it ends weekly limits return to their standard levels with no change to your plan or billing.
Because Anthropic has moved this deadline twice already, treat clau.de/cc-50-promo as the live source of truth if you are reading this near the expiry. The rest of this page documents the promotion as originally announced on May 13.
Anthropic increased Claude Code weekly limits by 50% on May 13, 2026, originally through July 13, 2026 (since extended twice, now to August 19). The lift is live for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise users. The exact wording from the official ClaudeDevs post:
Claude Code weekly limits are increasing 50%, now through July 13. Live now for all Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise users.
It comes about a week after Anthropic doubled five-hour rate limits and removed peak-hours limit reduction on the same plans. The practical headroom for heavy Claude Code users today is materially larger than it was at the start of May.
For context on what's been shipping in Claude Code itself, see Claude Code 2.1.133's worktree.baseRef and MCP OAuth proxy fixes and the spring quality post-mortem -- both are relevant context for how Anthropic is currently iterating on the product.
Key Takeaways
- +50% weekly limits, live now, through August 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT -- extended twice from the original July 13 deadline (a 98-day window from the May 13 announcement).
- Plans covered: Pro, Max, Team, and legacy seat-based Enterprise. Free plans and consumption-based Enterprise seats are excluded.
- Time-boxed. Expires August 19, 2026, unless Anthropic extends or replaces the policy again -- it has already extended twice.
- Stacks with the May 5-6 changes: five-hour rate limits doubled and peak-hours limit reduction removed for Pro/Max on Claude Code.
- No published absolute numbers. Anthropic describes both changes proportionally; check your own usage dashboard for the baseline.
- Affects weekly ceilings, not short-window bursts. The May 5-6 change is what addresses burst throttling; this is the weekly cap.
What the Official Sources Actually Say
The ClaudeDevs post is the authoritative source for this specific change. Two facts are explicit:
- The increase is 50%, applied to weekly limits.
- The window originally ended July 13, 2026 -- the post's wording is "now through July 13." Anthropic has since extended it twice, first to July 19 and then to August 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT, per its support documentation.
It is not a permanent policy change. If you build workflows that depend on the higher ceiling, plan for them to revert after August 19 unless Anthropic announces a further extension or a permanent re-quota before then. The two extensions so far are a reason to check the vendor doc rather than assume either the expiry or another reprieve.
What "Weekly Limits" Means in This Context
Claude Code limits operate at two layers:
- Short-window (five-hour) rate limits, which gate how much you can do in any rolling five-hour stretch.
- Weekly limits, which cap total usage in a seven-day window.
The May 13 change applies to the weekly layer. The May 5-6 change applied to the five-hour layer (and removed peak-hours reduction on Pro/Max). They address different problems: bursts versus aggregate weekly consumption.
What the Earlier May 5-6 Change Did
Anthropic's earlier "Higher limits" announcement covered:
- Doubling Claude Code five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.
- Removing peak-hours limit reduction for Claude Code on Pro and Max.
That earlier post does not describe the 50% weekly bump or its end date -- those are specific to the May 13 ClaudeDevs post and the support article that has carried the date since. Treat the two announcements as additive policies, each documented separately.
How the Two Changes Stack
| Layer | Pre-May 5 | May 5-6 change | May 13 change | Net effect today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Five-hour rate limit | Baseline | 2x for Pro/Max/Team/seat-Enterprise on Claude Code | No change | 2x burst headroom |
| Peak-hours reduction | Applied on Pro/Max | Removed for Claude Code on Pro/Max | No change | No peak-hours throttling on Claude Code |
| Weekly limit | Baseline | No change | +50% through August 19, 2026 | 1.5x weekly ceiling through August 19 |
| Plans affected | -- | Pro, Max, Team, seat-Enterprise | Pro, Max, Team, seat-Enterprise | Same plan set |
Two compounding lifts on different layers: bursts and weekly ceiling. The combined effect for a heavy user is larger than either alone.
How a Reader Uses This Window
The window (May 13 through August 19, 2026, after two extensions) is enough time to materially change a few categories of work, then plan a soft landing back to baseline:
- Context-heavy refactors. Large repos with deep Read passes and multi-agent Plan + Execute sessions consume a lot of weekly tokens. Move ones you've been deferring into this window.
- Multi-day subagent workflows. Subagent fan-out adds up fast on the weekly meter. The 50% lift makes those workflows comfortably under cap.
- Spike weeks. A release crunch or migration that would have pushed against the weekly cap can be absorbed within the lifted ceiling.
- Experimentation. Cheaper experimentation cost lets teams try patterns (different effort levels, different subagent topologies, custom hook scripts) without paying for them out of normal weekly budget.
The thing to avoid: building permanent workflows that only fit inside the +50% window, then discovering after August 19 they no longer fit. Treat the lift as runway, not as the new baseline.
When to Choose Claude Code vs. Other Tools This Quarter
The temporary lift changes the per-task economics of Claude Code specifically, not Codex or Cursor. If you've been splitting work across multiple AI coding tools partly to manage Claude Code quota:
| Situation | Suggestion through August 19 |
|---|---|
| You hit weekly limits often on Claude Code | Consolidate more work back into Claude Code while the lift is active |
| You hit five-hour limits often | Already addressed by the May 5-6 change; the May 13 change is unrelated |
| You're on the API / usage-based tier | The promo does not apply; no change to your usage economics |
| You're on Free | Not eligible; Anthropic's doc excludes Free plans by name |
| You're on seat-based Enterprise | The lift applies to legacy seat-based Enterprise users; consumption-based Enterprise seats are excluded. Coordinate with your admin if your org has additional internal caps |
For a comparison anchor across tools, our Codex CLI vs Claude Code vs Cursor architecture piece is the broader frame, and the recent 2.1.133 release coverage captures what's been shipping in the product itself.
Caveats
- No absolute numbers published. Anthropic describes the change as a percentage. Your own usage dashboard is the source for raw caps.
- Window ends August 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT (extended from July 13, then from July 19). Plan accordingly, and check
clau.de/cc-50-promobefore assuming the date is final -- it has moved twice. - Plan set is specific. The lift applies to Pro, Max, and Team plans plus legacy seat-based Enterprise -- not to API-billed or usage-based access. Free plans and consumption-based Enterprise seats are excluded by name.
- Weekly layer only. Anthropic's support doc states that five-hour usage limits are not affected by this promotion.
- No competitive commentary. Anthropic positions this as a customer-facing capacity adjustment; we are not speculating about what motivated the timing.
FAQ
See structured FAQ in the schema header for question-level details: what changed, which plans, permanence, how it stacks with the May 5-6 changes, raw numbers, and practical implications.
Sources
- Anthropic support article, "Claude Code May-August 2026 weekly limits promotion": https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15910845-claude-code-may-july-2026-weekly-limits-promotion (canonical vendor source for the current August 19, 2026 11:59 PM PT end date, eligibility, exclusions, and the CLI/IDE/desktop/web scope; reached from Anthropic's own short link clau.de/cc-50-promo; verified July 25, 2026)
- ClaudeDevs official post: https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054639777685934564 (3:07 PM, May 13, 2026 -- original announcement, "now through July 13")
- First extension, to July 19, 2026: Help Net Security, https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/07/13/claude-code-weekly-limits-promotion-extended/ and BleepingComputer, https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/claude-fable-5-stays-free-for-paid-users-until-july-19-as-anthropic-buys-more-time/ (both July 13, 2026; superseded by the August 19 date above)
- Anthropic "Higher limits" news post: https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex (context for the earlier five-hour and peak-hours changes; does not state the 50% weekly promo or end date)
Read next
Keep building the workspace playbookClaude Code 2.1.133: `worktree.baseRef` Default Returns to `origin/<default>`, MCP OAuth Proxy Honored Across the Whole Flow
Anthropic shipped Claude Code 2.1.133 on May 7, 2026. The headline is a worktree-base behavior change: a new `worktree.baseRef` setting (`fresh` | `head`) defaults to `fresh`, which moves `EnterWorktree`'s base back to `origin/<default>` after several months of branching from local `HEAD`. The release also routes `HTTP(S)_PROXY` / `NO_PROXY` / mTLS through the entire MCP OAuth flow (discovery, dynamic client registration, token exchange, refresh), exposes effort level to hooks via `$CLAUDE_EFFORT`, adds Linux sandbox path overrides, and fixes a refresh-token race that was 401-ing parallel sessions.
Anthropic's Claude Code Post-Mortem: Three Engineering Missteps Behind the Spring 2026 Quality Decline
Anthropic published a post-mortem on April 23, 2026 explaining the Claude Code quality regression that ran from early March through mid-April: a March 4 default-effort downgrade from high to medium, a March 26 caching change that wiped reasoning history every turn, and an April 16 verbosity prompt that capped responses at 25 words between tool calls. All three were resolved by April 20, the API was unaffected, and Anthropic reset usage limits for all subscribers.
Codex CLI vs Claude Code vs Cursor: 2026 Architecture Deep-Dive (Sandboxing, Context, Plugins, Scheduling)
Codex CLI, Claude Code, and Cursor all reach for the same outcome -- an AI agent that ships code -- with three different architectures. Codex enforces safety at the OS kernel layer. Claude Code uses application-layer hooks for programmable governance. Cursor builds the agent into a visual IDE with a marketplace of plugins. The right one depends less on which model you prefer and more on which architecture matches your security posture, your composition needs, and your team shape.
Frequently Asked Questions
What changed on May 13, 2026?
Anthropic increased Claude Code weekly limits by 50%, now through July 13, 2026. The exact wording from the official ClaudeDevs post: 'Claude Code weekly limits are increasing 50%, now through July 13. Live now for all Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise users.' Posted 3:07 PM, May 13, 2026.
Which plans get the increase?
Pro, Max, and Team plans, plus legacy seat-based users on Enterprise plans. Anthropic's support doc excludes Free plans and consumption-based Enterprise seats by name. Usage-based or API-billed access is not part of this promo -- it applies to seat/plan-based Claude Code usage.
Is this a permanent change or temporary?
Temporary. The May 13 ClaudeDevs wording was 'now through July 13,' but Anthropic has extended the window twice, first to July 19 and now to August 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT. It remains a time-boxed lift, not a permanent re-quota. When it ends, weekly limits return to their standard levels without any change to your plan or billing, unless Anthropic extends again.
How does this stack with the doubled five-hour rate limits announced in early May?
It is additive. On May 5-6, 2026, Anthropic announced it was doubling Claude Code five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans and removing peak-hours limit reduction for Claude Code on Pro and Max. That earlier change addressed short-window throttling. This newer change lifts the weekly cap by 50% through August 19, 2026. Anthropic's support doc is explicit that five-hour usage limits are not affected by the weekly promo, so the two are separate levers: more burst headroom in any five-hour window AND a higher weekly ceiling.
What were the actual numerical limits before and after?
Anthropic did not publish absolute numbers in either announcement. The May 5-6 'higher limits' news post and the May 13 ClaudeDevs post describe the changes as percentages (doubled, +50%) and as policy removals (no peak-hours reduction). Use your own historical usage dashboards as the baseline -- the proportions are what's documented, not the raw caps.
What should heavy Claude Code users do with this window?
Two practical implications. First, multi-day or context-heavy workflows (subagents, long Plan + Execute sessions, large repos with extensive Read passes) have meaningfully more headroom while the promo runs. Second, the lift now expires August 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT, so workflows that only fit inside the +50% should be re-planned before then -- not after -- to avoid a hard quota hit when the policy reverts.