GitHub Statistics 2026: Users, Repos, Copilot, and Global Reach

GitHub now reports 225 million-plus developers on its platform, with the 2025 Octoverse annual report counting over 180 million who work and build there. Over 36 million developers joined in the past year alone. The GitHub statistics below reflect the fastest absolute growth in the platform’s history, driven by the late-2024 launch of Copilot Free and a global surge outside the United States. The platform now hosts 630 million total projects and over 1.12 billion public-repository contributions in 2025, with 43.2 million pull requests merged on average each month, a 23% year-over-year jump.

The dominant story below the headline numbers is a quiet reframing. Most of GitHub’s 2025 activity does not live in public open source. Approximately 81.5% of all 2025 contributions happened in private repositories, and private repository volume grew 33% year over year, far faster than the public open-source pool the platform was built to serve. GitHub is no longer only an open-source archive; it is now the substrate on which most enterprise software teams collaborate.

Key Takeaways

• GitHub now serves over 180 million developers globally, up from over 150 million developers at the August 2025 leadership transition, a step-up driven by the Copilot Free launch.
• Approximately 81.5% of 2025 contributions happened in private repositories, with private-repository volume growing 33% year over year; the enterprise share is now the majority story on GitHub.
• GitHub passed 1 billion repositories and forks by the August 2025 leadership transition, and total project count reached 630 million across public and private repos.
• TypeScript overtook both Python and JavaScript in August 2025 to become the most-used language on GitHub, with approximately a 66.63% year-over-year contributor gain.
• India added more than 5.2 million developers in 2025, over 14% of GitHub’s new sign-ups, and India’s developer population rose from 4.5 million in 2020 to 21.9 million in 2025, a roughly five-fold expansion in five years.
• More than 1.1 million public repositories now use an LLM SDK, and 80% of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week.
• Developers pushed nearly 1 billion commits in 2025, a nearly 25.1% year-over-year gain, including a single-month record of nearly 100 million commits in August.

Editor’s Choice

• Total developers on GitHub: 180 million-plus as of the 2025 Octoverse report.
• New developers joined in 2025: over 36 million, more than one every second on average.
• Total projects on GitHub: 630 million in 2025, up from more than 518 million at the end of 2024.
• Public-repository contributions in 2025: over 1.12 billion, roughly 18.5% of the platform total.
• Pull requests merged per month: 43.2 million on average in 2025, up 23% year over year.
• New repositories created per minute: more than 230.
• Fortune 100 penetration: 90% of Fortune 100 companies use GitHub.

GitHub Statistics: Users and Developer Population Worldwide

• Global GitHub developer count reached 180 million-plus in 2025 (Octoverse annual report), up from over 150 million developers at the August 2025 leadership transition.
• More than one new developer joined GitHub every second on average in 2025, for a total of 36 million new sign-ups over the year.
• The Copilot Free launch in late 2024 coincided with a step-change in developer sign-ups, exceeding prior projections.
• GitHub’s own marketing page reports 225 million-plus developers, a figure roughly a quarter above the Octoverse count, reflecting a wider definition that includes lightly active accounts.
• Organizations on GitHub totaled 4 million-plus per GitHub’s About page tally, covering both open-source foundations and private enterprises.
• Fortune 100 penetration stands at 90%, per GitHub, the most concentrated slice of enterprise adoption in the platform’s history.
• The lift from 150 million to 180 million developers translates to a roughly 20% rise in the year after Copilot Free went live.

Source: GitHub Octoverse 2024 and 2025, GitHub About page, Wikipedia (2023 baseline).

Two AI shifts explain the developer-count acceleration in the second half of that trend. The first is that generative-AI models turned GitHub into the substrate where LLM-native code lands first, so vendors and researchers registered accounts to publish. The second driver visible in the GitHub statistics is Copilot Free itself: sign-ups rose sharply the quarter it launched, and the year’s growth totals were, per GitHub’s own framing, above what its internal modeling had predicted.

Repositories and Project Totals on GitHub

• Total projects on GitHub reached 630 million in 2025, up from about 518 million at the end of 2024 (a 25% year-over-year gain).
• GitHub had more than 1 billion repositories and forks by the August 2025 leadership transition, a milestone confirmed in the CEO transition announcement.
• New repositories are now being created at a rate of more than 230 per minute, roughly 331,000 per day at that pace.
• 63% of all repositories on GitHub were public in 2025, but the activity split is inverted (see the private-vs-public section below).
• Repositories using an LLM SDK reached 1.1 million-plus public projects, with 693,867 of them created in the past 12 months alone (a 178% year-over-year jump).
• AI-labeled projects on GitHub totaled 4.3 million in 2025.

Source: GitHub Octoverse 2024 and 2025, Wikipedia (Jan 2023 baseline).

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Recent Developments

The six developments below anchor the 2026 refresh of these GitHub statistics; each item carries the event date so a reader can verify the currency of the underlying figure.

• July 8, 2026: GitHub shipped the Copilot release for Visual Studio Code (June 2026), adding parallel sessions, clearer cost visibility, Marketplace model discovery, and Autopilot improvements across VS Code versions 1.123 through 1.127.
• October 28, 2025: GitHub published the 2025 Octoverse, confirming over 180 million developers and over 36 million new sign-ups in the report window.
• August 2025: TypeScript overtook both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub.
• August 2025: Developers pushed nearly 100 million commits in a single month, a platform record.
• August 11, 2025: GitHub’s CEO announced he is stepping down at the end of 2025 to become a founder again to pursue entrepreneurial ventures.
• July 30, 2025: Microsoft’s fiscal-year Q4 press release reported Intelligent Cloud revenue of $29.9 billion, up 26% year over year, the segment that houses GitHub cloud services.
• August 11, 2025: GitHub Copilot passed over 20 million users, and GitHub Actions ran 3 billion minutes per month (+64% YoY), per the CEO transition announcement.

Top Countries by GitHub Developer Population

• The United States remains #1 with 28 million developers in 2025, up from 10.2 million in 2020.
• India rose to #2 with 21.9 million developers, up from 4.5 million in 2020, roughly a 4.87x expansion in five years.
• India alone added more than 5.2 million developers in 2025, over 14% of GitHub’s total 36 million new sign-ups.
• Brazil now sits at #4 globally with 6.89 million developers.
• Indonesia climbed to 4.37 million developers, up from 0.9 million in 2020.
• Europe (Germany, ML hubs, France, and the UK) added +6.3 million developers, driven by cloud spend, AI investment, and startup-visa pipelines.
• Africa and the Middle East (Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt) added +3.4 million developers.

Programming Language Rankings on GitHub

• TypeScript ranked #1 by contributor growth in 2025, gaining approximately 1,054,015 contributors (a 66.63% year-over-year rise), the language’s first outright top spot on GitHub.
• Python ranked #2 by contributor growth, gaining approximately 850,000 contributors over the same window.
• Python overtook JavaScript in 2024 to become the most popular language on GitHub that year, a one-year reign before the TypeScript flip.
• JavaScript, TypeScript, and Java remain among the most widely used languages on GitHub, the four-way anchor set of the platform’s active codebases.
• Systems-programming languages such as Rust are on the rise, reflecting continued interest in memory-safety and low-level performance.
• Jupyter Notebooks surged in usage in 2024 on the back of data-science and machine-learning workloads, the leading indicator for Python’s 2024 top rank.

Source: GitHub Octoverse 2025.

TypeScript’s overtake is more than a stylistic shift. The Octoverse framing links it directly to AI-assisted coding: teams pushing AI-generated code into production trust typed languages more than dynamically typed ones, so the rise of typed languages reflects which languages teams trust to take AI-generated code into production. That reads as a signal about how enterprises adopt LLM tooling, not just a fashion swing.

Key finding: TypeScript’s 2025 overtake of both Python and JavaScript for #1 growth on GitHub arrived with approximately a 66.63% year-over-year contributor gain (Source: GitHub Octoverse 2025). The shift reads as a signal about how enterprises adopt LLM tooling, not just a fashion swing.

This mirrors broader enterprise cybersecurity trends around defensive tooling in AI-assisted development.

Private vs Public Repository Contribution Split

• In 2025, approximately 81.5% of contributions on GitHub happened in private repositories; the enterprise share is now the majority story.
• 63% of all repositories were still public in 2025; the count of open repos is larger, but the volume of daily contribution work sits inside private ones.
• Private repositories carried 4.97 billion contributions in 2025 (year-to-date at the Octoverse report window).
• Public repositories carried 1.12 billion contributions in the same window, roughly 18.5% of the platform total.
• Private-repository volume grew 33% year over year, outpacing public-repo volume growth.
• The split is not a decline in open source but a rise in enterprise adoption: most day-to-day work takes place in private projects, but depends on libraries, models, and frameworks in public open source.

This is the number that reframes every other GitHub statistic on the page. GitHub’s brand identity was built on public open source. Rails, Node, React, Kubernetes; but the 2025 data is unambiguous: four out of every five contribution events happen inside a private team’s repo, and the private slice grew a third faster year over year. GitHub is now first an enterprise-collaboration substrate and second an open-source archive.

Pull Requests, Commits, and Platform Activity

• GitHub developers merged 43.2 million pull requests on average each month in 2025 (+23% YoY).
• The platform recorded a record 518.7 million pull requests merged over the year (+29% YoY).
• Developers pushed nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 (+25.1% YoY), the platform’s largest single-year total on record.
• A single-month record of nearly 100 million commits landed in August 2025 alone, coincident with the TypeScript overtake.
• New repositories were created at 230 per minute in 2025, roughly 331,000 per day at that pace.
• Public-repository contributions reached over 1.12 billion in 2025 (YTD at Octoverse report time), roughly 18.5% of the platform total.

Source: GitHub Octoverse 2025.

Why it matters: In 2025, GitHub developers merged 43.2 million pull requests on average each month, up 23% year over year, and pushed nearly 1 billion commits over the year, a 25.1% year-over-year jump, including a single-month record of nearly 100 million commits in August (Source: GitHub Octoverse 2025). The scale reads as a platform-level effect: the growth is spread across active repos, not concentrated in a small number of high-volume projects.

GitHub Copilot Adoption

• 80% of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week, a step-change over the pre-2024 baseline.
• More than 1 million maintainers, teachers, and students used GitHub Copilot for free during 2024, before the general Copilot Free launch expanded that access.
• The Copilot Free launch in late 2024 coincided with a step-change in developer sign-ups, with the year-over-year sign-up total exceeding GitHub’s prior internal projections.
• Public repositories using an LLM SDK reached 1.1 million-plus, with 693,867 of them created in the past 12 months alone (+178% YoY).
• AI-labeled projects on GitHub totaled 4.3 million in 2025, the largest public catalog of AI code on any platform.

Copilot Free is the single largest driver of the 2025 sign-up curve visible in GitHub statistics. Sign-ups did not just rise in absolute terms. GitHub’s Octoverse report frames the trajectory as one that broke the internal growth models. The wider Linux and open-source developer base compounds Copilot Free’s onboarding effect. Copilot adoption also intersects with cybersecurity attack data since AI-generated code introduces new supply-chain risk vectors.

GitHub Security Telemetry: Dependabot at Scale

• Dependabot pull requests merged reached 12.15 million in 2023, the pre-Log4Shell-echo baseline.
• Dependabot merged pull requests peaked at 15.39 million in 2024, a 27% rise over 2023 as vulnerability disclosures accumulated.
• In 2025, Dependabot merged pull requests eased slightly to 14.17 million, still nearly a fifth above the 2023 baseline.
• Dependabot alerts peaked at more than 12 million in December 2022, one year after the Log4Shell disclosure, the largest alert surge in the tool’s history.
• Dependabot activity now functions as a platform-scale security telemetry signal, and it is one of the most-cited GitHub statistics for open-source supply-chain risk, tracking the flow of CVE disclosures across GitHub’s 630 million projects.

GitHub’s Financial Footprint Inside Microsoft

• GitHub and its leadership team continue their mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization (see broader Microsoft coverage), following the August 2025 transition announcement.
• Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment revenue reached $29.9 billion in Q4 of fiscal year 2025 (quarter ended June 30, 2025), up 26% year over year, the segment that houses GitHub cloud services.
• Microsoft’s consolidated Q4 FY25 revenue reached $76.4 billion, up 18% year over year.
• Microsoft’s Q4 FY25 net income reached $27.2 billion, up 24% year over year.
• Server products and cloud services revenue increased 27% in Q4 FY25, driven by Azure and other cloud services revenue growth of 39%.
• Microsoft does not break out GitHub’s standalone revenue in its public filings; the segment-level Intelligent Cloud number is the closest disclosed proxy.

Source: Microsoft FY25 Q4 press release (July 30, 2025).

GitHub Copilot and Actions Momentum

• GitHub Copilot passed over 20 million users and counting by August 2025, per the outgoing CEO’s transition post.
• GitHub Actions now powers 3 billion minutes per month, up 64% year over year, firmly the leading CI solution on the platform.
• GitHub had over 150 million developers and more than 1 billion repositories and forks at the August 2025 transition.
• GitHub shipped the June 2026 Copilot release for Visual Studio Code, adding parallel sessions, cost visibility, Marketplace model providers, and Autopilot improvements across VS Code versions 1.123 through 1.127.
• The Copilot Free program launched in late 2024 is the single lever most visible in the sign-up curve, both in the Octoverse annual data and in the outgoing CEO’s own framing of the transition.

Source: GitHub CEO transition post (August 11, 2025).

Is GitHub Still Owned by Microsoft?

Yes. As of the August 2025 leadership transition, GitHub and its leadership team continue their mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization. GitHub Copilot cloud revenue rolls up through Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment, and GitHub’s outgoing CEO is staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition before leaving to build his next adventure.

Who Is Bigger, GitLab or GitHub?

The GitHub statistics put it far ahead of GitLab on developer count. GitHub reports over 180 million developers on its platform and 630 million total projects. On enterprise revenue, both platforms have serious commercial businesses, but Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment, which absorbs GitHub’s cloud revenue, cleared $29.9 billion in a single quarter (FY25 Q4), a scale GitLab does not approach as a standalone company.

What Is Replacing GitHub?

Nothing at platform scale, according to current GitHub statistics. Self-hosted alternatives such as Gitea, Forgejo, and Codeberg remain viable for developers who want off-Microsoft infrastructure, and Bitbucket and GitLab operate serious commercial businesses in adjacent niches. But the underlying developer-count and repository-count numbers show no measurable exodus: GitHub added over 36 million new developers in 2025 alone, and passed more than 1 billion repositories and forks with over 20 million Copilot users by August 2025.

Conclusion

The GitHub statistics compiled above describe a platform of two overlapping stories in 2026. On one side, the open-source archive keeps expanding: 630 million projects, over 1.12 billion public-repository contributions, 4.3 million AI-labeled projects, and languages that shift under the influence of AI-assisted coding. On the other hand, the enterprise-collaboration substrate now dominates the activity data: approximately 81.5% of 2025 contributions ran through private repositories, and private-repo volume grew a third year over year. Both stories are true at once, and both are why 90% of Fortune 100 companies build software here.

The next two years will test whether the platform’s growth curve holds after Copilot Free’s initial pull fades. India’s developer trajectory is the clearest tailwind: 21.9 million developers there in 2025, up from 4.5 million in 2020, with a further 5.2 million added in 2025 alone. TypeScript’s #1 slot, private-repo growth above 33%, and whether Microsoft ever breaks out GitHub-standalone revenue (as it did for LinkedIn): those three metrics will decide the shape of the next Mobile vs desktop developer split.