Claude Code gets a wrap-up budget at the 5-hour limit

When a 5-hour session limit lands mid-edit, Claude Code will now try to bring the task to a clean stop rather than quit wherever the meter runs out. Anthropic announced the change in a September 25 post from its ClaudeDevs account on X. To finish the work, Claude Code draws a small, fixed allowance from your weekly limit. Anthropic hasn’t said how large that allowance is, and it only promises that Claude Code will try.

Before this, the documented behaviour was a warning (“Approaching 5-hour limit”) followed by a hard block: “5-hour limit reached — resets [time].” There was no fallback to a smaller model. You either waited for the rolling window to reset or paid to keep going, and any edit in progress stayed half-written. The window measures usage, so one heavy agentic run can use it up in under an hour.

How often you get the wrap-up depends on your plan. Max and Team Premium get one every time they hit a 5-hour session limit, while Pro gets it only once a week during the rollout. The other half of the problem is already covered on desktop: since August, an auto-continue checkbox resumes a stalled session from where it stopped once the limit refreshes.

If you need to keep working after the wrap-up, you can switch to extra usage, now called usage credits. It is billed at standard API pricing rates, up to a monthly spend cap you set.

The wrap-up allowance comes out of a weekly budget that changed on September 14. That day, a temporary boost of about 50% ended and a permanent increase of about 25% over the old standard took its place, which leaves roughly 17% less weekly headroom than in August. To see when your account’s weekly limit resets, open /usage or Settings > Usage.