What is a 5-hour window?

Codex: "Depending on your plan, usage limits may apply over a five-hour window and a weekly window. Where both apply, you need allowance remaining in both to continue". The window is not a fixed clock: it starts with your first message after the previous window ends, and "You may reach the five-hour limit before five hours have passed, even if you still have weekly usage remaining." The pricing page publishes per-plan estimates, for example 5–45 GPT-6 Astra local messages per five-hour period on Plus, that "are not fixed message limits".

Claude Pro and Max: "Your session-based usage limit will reset every five hours." Max 5x and 20x are described as five and twenty times the Pro per-session allowance, with no absolute number. The pool is shared across claude.ai and Claude Code, and "Usage credits don't affect this reset timing." Settings > Usage shows how much of the session you have used and the time remaining; Anthropic's pages do not say what starts the clock.

The Codex window has been switched off and on. On 2026-07-12 Tibo Sottiaux announced "Temporarily removing the 5 hour usage limit restriction for all Plus, Business and Pro plans". In a post timestamped 2026-08-25 01:16 UTC he wrote "Tomorrow we will bring back the 5h limit for Plus accounts across ChatGPT Work and Codex", which puts the return for Plus on 2026-08-25 US Pacific time; the same post keeps the limit "not enabled for Pro $100 and Pro $200 subscriptions" for the upcoming months.

On the board, this window is not what is tracked. LAST RESET and NEXT EST. describe account-wide resets announced by the vendor, and the STATUS words RESET NOW, BANKED, TEASE, WAITING and OVERDUE never refer to your own window. To count down your own window, paste the time from /status or /usage into the window tracker; the math stays in your browser.