GitHub Actions: "The job was not acquired by Runner of type hosted even after multiple attempts"
GitHub tried several times to hand the job to one of its hosted runners, none took it, and GitHub gave up. Nothing in your workflow ran: the job has no runner and no steps, so your code is not at fault. Re-running the failed jobs is the fix, and often the only one.
What the job looks like
A public run on November 2, 2026, with runs-on: macos-latest: the job was created at 19:33:27 UTC and cancelled at 19:48:42, about 15 minutes later, with no runner name and no steps. Its annotations:
The job was not acquired by Runner of type hosted even after multiple attempts Due to capacity constraints, jobs targeting macOS arm64 runners may experience longer queue times.
- The second line is a notice, and it appeared three times on that job.
- The job ends as Cancelled; some projects report Failure. The run as a whole fails.
- Until GitHub gives up, the job shows "Waiting for a runner to pick up this job" (the other reasons a job waits). Another project's job "waited 15 minutes in the macOS arm64 queue" before the same message (semantic-diff-weaver #59).
Why: not enough runners of that kind
On November 2, 2026 the reports were about macOS arm64, and they came from macos-latest (macOS 26) and macos-15 alike: one project pinned macos-15 and its build was still cancelled eight more times (chrome-use #844). Moving between arm64 labels does not reliably help. It is not one of these, which look different:
- The plan's concurrency limit: the extra jobs wait their turn and are not cancelled after 15 minutes.
- A retired label such as
macos-14: what those jobs do. - Self-hosted labels that no runner has: the job waits up to 24 hours.
- Billing: a job GitHub will not start because of the account's payments or spending limit fails within seconds ("The job was not started because recent account payments have failed").
What to do
- Re-run: on the run's page, Re-run jobs > Re-run failed jobs, or
gh run rerun <run-id> --failed. - Check for an incident on GitHub Status.
- Use another pool: one project builds its macOS arm64 binary by cross-compiling on
macos-15-intel, a separate pool of runners (chrome-use #844). - Keep it from blocking: projects make the macOS job optional on pull requests, or re-run automatically with a
workflow_runworkflow that re-runs only when every failed job carries this message, with a limit on attempts (spinagram #9).
To tell this case from a real failure: a job that never ran has no runner and no steps, and the message is in its annotations (a job's id is also its check run id):
gh api repos/OWNER/REPO/actions/jobs/JOB_ID --jq '{runner_name, steps: (.steps | length)}'
gh api repos/OWNER/REPO/check-runs/JOB_ID/annotations --jq '.[].message'
A gate that passes anyway
One project found that its "all checks passed" job passed although a matrix leg had been cancelled this way, because the gate only read needs.<job>.result; it now reads the jobs of its own run from the API (semantic-diff-weaver #59, which points to GitHub community discussion 211624 for the same behaviour elsewhere). If a release depends on such a gate, check that it fails when a leg never ran.
See jobs that never got a runner from IntelliJ IDEA
Pipeline Inbox for GitHub Actions Workflows, a plugin by Lesstep for JetBrains IDEs 2024.1 or later, lists the runs of all your repositories in an IDE tool window, with their jobs and steps, so a cancelled job with no steps stands out next to the ones that ran, and your current branch's runs are in the status bar. Reading is free; re-running failed jobs, cancelling, running workflows and reviewing deployments are Pro (US$1.50 a month, with a 30-day trial).
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More: "Waiting for a runner to pick up this job" · The macOS 14 runner image is retired · Re-running jobs with debug logging · GitHub Actions plugins for IntelliJ IDEA compared · 日本語