GitLab for Education — Frequently Asked Questions

To qualify, an institution must meet all three of the following criteria:

• Primary purpose of teaching: The institution's primary mission must be teaching its enrolled students.
• Credential granting: The institution must actively issue degrees, diplomas, or certificates.
• Not-for-profit: For-profit institutions are not eligible.

Only full-time faculty or staff may apply, using an institutional email address — personal email domains are not accepted.

No. The program is issued at the institution level. GitLab does not issue Education licences directly to students.

The best route is to encourage a faculty or staff member at your institution to apply on the institution's behalf. Once approved, they can add you to the institution's GitLab instance or group.

Yes — provided the research is non-commercial academic research and the institution itself qualifies for the program.

Qualifying research means conducting not-for-profit projects that do not produce results, works, services, or data for commercial use by anyone to generate revenue.

The licence may only be used for educational use or non-commercial academic research. IT staff administering a GitLab instance for this purpose can use it. Using GitLab for general institution infrastructure, internal tooling, or campus-wide services unrelated to education does not qualify.

Verification is handled as part of the application process. After you complete the form using your institutional email, GitLab's partner Proxi.id will review your submission. If verified, you will receive an email with instructions to set up your subscription.

Both new applications and annual renewals use the same form.

The licence must be renewed annually using the same application form as the initial application. A few things to check before renewing:

• The person renewing must be the same person who created the subscription in the Customer Portal. If a different person needs to renew, the existing owner must first transfer ownership.
• If the original owner can no longer do this, open a support ticket to request a change of subscription owner.
• The number of seats and licence type (SaaS or self-managed) can be changed at renewal.

Yes. If you are running a self-managed deployment, it is possible to activate multiple instances using the same licence key. This can be useful for institutions that need separate instances for different faculties, departments, or security boundaries.

First, check that you and your institution meet the program criteria. If you believe you have been wrongly rejected or cannot provide sufficient documentation to our verification provider, contact the Education team directly.

The Education programme licence is institution-wide with unlimited seats — you do not issue individual licences. Instead, give students access by adding them to your GitLab instance or group:

• Students create a free GitLab account (or sign in via institutional SSO if configured).
• They provide you with their GitLab username.
• You invite them to the relevant course group or subgroup with the Developer role.
• They immediately gain access to all projects within that group, with full Ultimate features.

There is no per-student activation process — access is controlled entirely through group membership.

Your subscription is managed through the GitLab Customer Portal at customers.gitlab.com.

• SaaS (GitLab.com): Manage billing and seats under your top-level group's Settings → Billing.
• Self-managed: After renewing, copy the new activation code from the Customer Portal and apply it in your instance via Admin → Subscription.

No. The licence is issued to the institution. Once a student is no longer enrolled, they are no longer covered and will need their own access separately.

On a self-managed instance, disabling the student's institutional account in LDAP will block GitLab access at the next sync. On GitLab.com, remove them from your institution's group.

GitLab Ultimate gives students access to the same tools used by professional software teams. Key capabilities included in the Education licence:

• CI/CD pipelines — Automated build, test, and deployment pipelines, with 50,000 compute minutes per month.
• Security scanning — SAST, dependency scanning, container scanning, secret detection, and a full vulnerability report.
• Merge request approvals — Define approval rules, enforce code review, and teach professional peer review practices.
• GitLab Duo (AI features) — Code Suggestions and AI Chat within the IDE.
• Portfolio and project management — Epics, roadmaps, milestones, and issue boards.
• Web IDE and Workspaces — A browser-based IDE so students can contribute without local setup.
• Compliance and audit tools — Useful for teaching governance and regulated development practices.

GitLab's unified platform covers the full software development lifecycle. Some common use cases:

• Version control and Git fundamentals — A real-world environment to learn branching, committing, merging, and resolving conflicts.
• Assignment submission and feedback — Distribute assignments as template repositories, have students fork and submit via Merge Request, then provide inline code feedback.
• Automated testing and CI/CD — Include automated test suites in assignment templates to give students instant feedback on every push.
• Software engineering practices — Teach code review, pair programming, pull-based workflows, issue tracking, and project planning.
• DevSecOps education — Use Ultimate's built-in security scanning to teach SAST, dependency vulnerabilities, and secret detection in a practical context.
• Research collaboration — Manage research codebases, data pipelines, and documentation collaboratively.

GitLab technical support is not included with the standard Education licence. Available resources:

• GitLab Documentation — docs.gitlab.com
• GitLab Community Forum — forum.gitlab.com — there is a dedicated category for education users.
• GitLab University — Free self-paced learning and certifications at university.gitlab.com.
• Subscription and licensing issues — Open a support ticket at support.gitlab.com and select Subscription, License or Customers Portal Problems. This is available regardless of licence tier.
• GitLab for Campuses — Institutions needing paid technical support can explore the GitLab for Campuses subscription.