Your rulesets won't be enforced on this private repository until you upgrade this organization account to GitHub Team Error

[Grindhead]

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I am getting the error Your rulesets won't be enforced on this private repository until you upgrade this organization account to GitHub Team yet I am already paying for a team on github? My CI/CD is failing because of this

[Mr-Madhukar]

Hi there,

This error happens because rulesets are a GitHub Team feature, and they don't work on private repositories unless your organization account is on the paid GitHub Team plan.

Here's what's happening:

You have a private repository in your organization

You created a ruleset to enforce branch protection or code rules

But your organization is still on a free or lower plan (like GitHub Free or GitHub Pro)

GitHub is blocking the ruleset enforcement until you upgrade

What you need to do:

Upgrade your organization to GitHub Team (paid plan)

Go to your organization settings → Billing and plans

Click Upgrade to Team and complete the payment

After upgrading, rulesets will start working on private repos

If you can't upgrade right now:

You can still create and view rulesets, but they won't be enforced

As a workaround, use Branch protection rules (which work on all plans) instead of rulesets

Go to Settings → Branches → Add rule

For organization repos:

Make sure your repository is in an organization account (not a personal account)

Rulesets do NOT work on private personal repositories at all — only on organization repos with Team plan

Quick summary: Upgrade to GitHub Team, and your rulesets will start enforcing immediately on that private repository.

Let me know if you need help with the upgrade process!

[Shifkan04]

Hey! I ran into the same error before. Even if your org is on a Team plan, GitHub sometimes doesn’t immediately recognize the upgrade on private repos. A few things that helped me:

1. Double-check your billing – make sure the Team plan is active for the org that owns the repo, not just your personal account.

2. Refresh repo settings – sometimes toggling the rulesets off and on again in the repo settings triggers GitHub to enforce them.

3. If that doesn’t work, contact GitHub Support and mention your CI/CD failure; they usually fix the enforcement quickly once they verify the org plan.

Basically, the message doesn’t always mean your plan isn’t active — it could just be a sync issue. Hope that helps!