GitHub’s 2026 Octoverse report, announced on October 28, says developers pushed code to the platform 17.9 billion times in the past 12 months—more than in 2024 and 2025 combined. The company also counted 34.3 billion commits across public and private repositories, and 1.3 billion merged pull requests, more than three times the total from two years earlier.
The figures come as more developers use AI agents to help write code. GitHub says that, in September, developers started more than 40% of pull requests with an agent, up from 17% in March. Among repositories created this year, those with an agent configuration file averaged eight times as many commits as new repositories without one. That is an association, not proof that agents alone caused the difference.
The reported totals use different measures
Simon Willison, writing from GitHub Universe, reported another set of figures highlighted by GitHub executive Jay Parikh: 220 million merged pull requests per month, 7.38 billion commits per month, and 30.3 million new repositories per month. Those monthly rates do not line up with the annual totals in GitHub’s blog post—for example, 220 million merged pull requests a month is far above 1.3 billion in a year. The supplied figures do not explain how the measures differ, so they should not be treated as interchangeable.
GitHub’s report also describes a sharp rise in activity around June. The company points to improved models, new tools and agents that can work remotely or keep track of tasks over time as factors that coincided with the increase. It says GitHub Actions ran 1,440 jobs per second on average during the year, while developers merged more than 30 million Dependabot pull requests.
More developers are building across fields
GitHub says it now serves more than 225 million developers. The United States and India remain its largest developer communities, with 38.3 million and 32 million people, respectively, in September 2026. Brazil added 3.28 million developers over the year.
For the first time, the Octoverse report sorts public repositories by industry. GitHub says public repositories related to mining, construction, health care and agriculture have each grown several times over since 2022. Its industry categories rely on a machine-learning model that sorts repositories using their names, descriptions, topics and README files, as Willison notes.
Why it matters
For developers using GitHub, the figures show that agent-assisted work is becoming a more common way to start pull requests, while the platform is handling far more code activity. The numbers do not establish how much of that growth agents caused, or whether the monthly rates Willison reported measure the same activity as GitHub’s annual totals.
