explainx / blog
From the August 2025 weekly caps to the March 2026 off-peak promo to the permanent May 6, 2026 doubling — a dated timeline of every Claude usage limit change, what stayed the same, and how to check your own numbers.
Jun 12, 2026
Claude Code has two billing paths: a subscription plan (Pro at $20/month, Max at $100–$200/month) or bring-your-own API key with pay-per-token rates. This guide breaks down every option, compares them against Cursor and Copilot, and shows you exactly when each makes sense.
Jul 4, 2026
@ClaudeDevs posted "/radio" with a strawberry-and-sun pixel art clip — and 400K+ developers asked the same question. It is not FM radio in your terminal. It is Claude FM: a built-in slash command that opens Anthropic's lo-fi stream while you code.
Jun 27, 2026
Plan Mode gives you a complete picture of what Claude intends to do — which files it will touch, why, and in what order — before a single character changes. Here is how to use it properly.
If you've lost track of whether Claude got more generous or more restrictive lately, you're not imagining things — it's done both. Since August 2025, Anthropic has changed Claude's usage limits at least three separate times: it added weekly caps on top of the existing rolling window, ran a two-week off-peak doubling in March 2026, then permanently doubled Claude Code's 5-hour limits on May 6, 2026. Two of those changes are still active. One ended on schedule. This post lays out the dated timeline so you can tell which limit you're actually running into today, and links out to Anthropic's own numbers rather than secondhand recaps.
If you're also weighing whether your subscription tier makes sense given these changes, our Claude Code pricing guide breaks down Pro versus Max 5x versus Max 20x in more depth, and our coverage of the Claude Max usage-limits lawsuit covers the class-action angle if you feel the advertised multipliers don't match what you're getting.
There is no single product called "Claude 2x." Every time you've seen that phrase, it's referred to a specific, dated change to the limits on an existing plan — never a new SKU you can buy. Three events matter here:
| Date | Change | Status as of July 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 28, 2025 | Weekly rate limits added on top of the rolling 5-hour window | Still in effect |
| Mar 13–28, 2026 | Off-peak promo doubled 5-hour limits outside peak hours and on weekends | Ended, no longer active |
| May 6, 2026 | Claude Code's 5-hour limits permanently doubled; peak-hour throttling removed for Pro/Max | Still in effect |
The weekly cap is the one constant across all three events. Neither the March promo nor the May 6 change touched it.
Anthropic announced new weekly rate limits for Claude Pro and Max on July 28, 2025, confirming on X that the change would go into effect in late August and would "apply to less than 5% of subscribers based on current usage." The limits took effect on August 28, 2025, stacking a 7-day reset cycle on top of the existing rolling 5-hour window.
Per Anthropic's published allowances at the time, weekly usage broke down roughly as follows:
| Plan | Sonnet 4 per week | Opus 4 per week |
|---|---|---|
| Pro ($20/mo) | 40–80 hours | Not included |
| Max ($100/mo) | 140–280 hours | 15–35 hours |
| Max ($200/mo) | 240–480 hours | 24–40 hours |
Anthropic's stated reasons, as reported by TechCrunch, were: a small number of users running Claude Code essentially 24/7, account sharing, and unauthorized reselling of access — all degrading availability for everyone else amid what Anthropic called "unprecedented demand." This is the moment Claude went from one limit to two, and it's the reason every later "doubling" headline has to specify which limit it touched.
Anthropic ran a temporary promotion doubling 5-hour usage limits during off-peak hours and all weekend for Free, Pro, Max, and Team users. Peak hours were defined as 8 AM–2 PM ET (5–11 AM PT, 12–6 PM GMT) on weekdays — outside that window, and all day Saturday and Sunday, users got double their normal 5-hour allowance. The bonus usage did not count against weekly caps. Enterprise plans were excluded.
The promo ended on schedule on March 28, 2026. If you're still budgeting your Claude Code sessions around a "2x on weekends" assumption, that window closed months ago.
On May 6, 2026, Anthropic announced it had permanently doubled Claude Code's 5-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans, and removed the peak-hour limit reduction that previously applied to Pro and Max accounts. Claude Opus API rate limits also went up substantially.
The change was enabled by a new compute agreement: Anthropic secured access to SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center, described in the announcement as delivering "more than 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs) within the month." Anthropic also referenced parallel capacity deals with Amazon (up to 5 GW), Google (5 GW with Broadcom, starting 2027), and a $30 billion Microsoft/NVIDIA Azure agreement — context for why this doubling arrived when it did rather than earlier.
Three things this change did not touch:
For a head-to-head look at how this landed against competing tools, see our coverage of the Claude Code vs. Codex rate-limit boost.
Each of these three events maps to the same underlying variable: the gap between demand for Claude Code and the compute Anthropic has online at any given moment.
The practical implication: don't treat any single announcement as final. Anthropic has revised these numbers multiple times in under a year, and the Claude Max usage-limits lawsuit filed in June 2026 is itself evidence that even Anthropic's own marketing multipliers ("5x," "20x") have been contested in practice. Check /usage when a workflow starts hitting walls rather than relying on memorized figures.
| Plan | Pre-May 6 5-hr limit | Post-May 6 5-hr limit | Peak-hour throttle | Weekly cap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | Baseline | 2x baseline | Removed | Unchanged |
| Max 5x | Baseline | 2x baseline | Removed | Unchanged |
| Max 20x | Baseline | 2x baseline | Removed | Unchanged |
| Free | No Claude Code access | No Claude Code access | N/A | N/A |
Anthropic doesn't publish exact message counts — it publishes plan multipliers (5x, 20x relative to Pro) and lets weekly-hour figures serve as the closest concrete anchor. If you were on Pro before May 6 and noticed sessions throttling mid-afternoon, that specific pain point — peak-hour reduction — is gone. The weekly bucket, though, is the same size it's always been; if a sustained multi-day workload was your actual bottleneck, this change doesn't move that number.
Underneath every headline, Claude enforces two independent limits, and understanding both is what actually keeps you from getting surprised:
On Max plans, Sonnet and Opus draw from separate 5-hour and weekly buckets. On Pro, the two models share a single pool — so running a long Opus session on Pro eats into your Sonnet headroom for the rest of the window, while on Max it doesn't.
Check both numbers directly rather than guessing:
$ claude /usage
The output shows 5-hour consumption per model, weekly cap percentage, and reset times. This is the only figure that reflects Anthropic's current configuration — community trackers and single-point-in-time articles (including this one) are a snapshot of one date, not a live feed.
If you're regularly running into the context side of these limits rather than the usage side, our guide on managing Claude Code's context window covers the /compact and /clear workflow that keeps sessions efficient regardless of which plan you're on.
| Plan | Price | Best for | Notes after May 6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | $20/mo | Assistant-style chat, light Claude Code use | No more peak-hour throttling; doubled 5-hr window |
| Max 5x | $100/mo | Daily Claude Code sessions | 5x Pro's headroom, both models on separate buckets |
| Max 20x | $200/mo | Heavy agentic workflows, multi-repo sessions | Highest request priority; still weekly-capped like every other tier |
If Pro's 5-hour window was your bottleneck before May 6, it's worth re-testing before assuming you still need Max — the removed peak-hour throttle alone changes a lot for anyone whose sessions used to run during the 8 AM–2 PM ET window. For a fuller cost breakdown including bring-your-own-API-key economics, see the Claude Code pricing guide.
Regardless of which numbers are current when you read this, these habits reduce how fast you burn through either limit:
/compact and /clear deliberately. Every turn in a long session re-sends prior context. Compacting periodically and clearing between unrelated tasks keeps token consumption — and by extension your window burn — proportional to actual work done./compact and /clear workflows that stretch any plan furtherUsage limits and plan allowances change frequently. The figures above reflect Anthropic's published announcements as of July 5, 2026 — always confirm current numbers with /usage or claude.ai before making a plan decision.