Summary: OpenAI’s Codex for Students appeared on March 20, 2026, offering eligible students $100 of ChatGPT credit as 2,500 credits for Codex, with a 12-month expiry. To qualify, a student must currently attend a degree-granting university in the US or Canada and be located in one of those countries when claiming, with one claim per person. The credit is not for the API and is designed to extend Codex usage beyond an existing ChatGPT plan.
March 20, 2026 is the day a new line quietly appeared in OpenAI’s ChatGPT release notes: Codex for Students. University students enrolled in the United States or Canada who pass identity verification can pick up $100 in ChatGPT credit at no cost — and that credit has exactly one permitted destination: Codex, OpenAI’s agentic coding tool. It arrives as a 2,500-credit balance worth $100 and remains valid for 12 months from the day it is granted.
Don’t mistake this for an ordinary giveaway. Within the same month, GitHub shifted its complimentary student benefits onto a fresh “GitHub Copilot Student plan” (live as of March 12), while JetBrains ran a limited-time free promotion putting Codex — running on GPT-5 — inside its own IDE assistant. The campus has become the opening front of the agentic coding tool battle.
The Deal: Eligibility and How to Claim
Drawing on OpenAI’s official page and its service credit terms, the rules break down like this:
- Who qualifies: students currently enrolled at degree-granting universities in the U.S. or Canada, who must also be located in one of the two countries at claim time; each person may claim once only.
- Verification: begin on the official claim page using a ChatGPT account together with a university email address; the account carries no requirement to be linked to your school — a personal one is fine, though student status itself still has to verify.
- The credit: once verification clears, the balance is added to your ChatGPT account automatically, is restricted to Codex, and serves to push usage past what your current plan allows. It is not an API credit.
- Prerequisites: a seat on any ChatGPT tier (Free, Go, Plus, or Pro) is enough; Codex already ships inside the ChatGPT account, so no separate application exists.
- Deadline: credits must be spent within 12 months of the grant date, and whatever is left afterward simply vanishes. Remaining balances show up on the usage page in Codex settings.
Why Now: Three Moves, One Timeline
Set the three moves side by side and the message writes itself. March 12: GitHub rebuilt Copilot’s free student perks as a standalone Student plan, promoting the campus from a bundled extra to a product line of its own. March 20: OpenAI walked in with actual dollar credits, pinned exclusively to Codex. Alongside them, JetBrains leaned on a time-limited free window to pull Codex into its IDE ecosystem. All three are after the same people — future developers whose tool habits have not hardened yet.
The reasoning behind the scramble is easy to reconstruct. Back in the autocomplete era, Copilot already demonstrated that one funnel works: free while you study, paid once you’re hired. Agentic coding raises the stakes, because lock-in deepens — workflows, project context, and operating habits all pile up inside a single platform. Whoever captures the students holds the default for the next generation.
What OpenAI Really Gets for $100 per Student
Through the lens of unit economics, a $100 acquisition cost per head barely registers on OpenAI’s ledger; the actual wager is retention once the habit takes root. Three design choices spell out the plan. One: the grant is a ChatGPT credit rather than an API credit, keeping recipients inside the ChatGPT account universe instead of steering them toward the API developer ecosystem. Two: the credits explicitly “extend Codex usage beyond the limits included in your plan,” handing students an early preview of post-paywall productivity. Three: the 12-month window lands close to a full academic year, deliberately spanning an entire course cycle.
The contrast is telling: GitHub’s Student plan leans on its proven campus verification machinery and tighter IDE integration, while OpenAI’s differentiation is novelty itself — pitching Codex’s agentic strengths, autonomous planning, multi-file edits, and background execution among them, as a category students have yet to touch.
What Students and Teachers Should Do Next
Students: claim only on the official domains (chatgpt.com and openai.com) — phishing clones of credit promotions are already circulating. After claiming, watch the usage page closely, because agentic tools drain credits far faster than manual chat ever does. Educators: the question worth grappling with is not whether students may use these tools but how to shape assessment — let the agent absorb the boilerplate while fundamentals still get measured. Reading debugger output, weighing architecture trade-offs, and defining acceptance criteria are exactly the skills climbing in value.
$100 won’t buy a course, yet it can secure a full year of habit. OpenAI has plainly run the numbers.