GitHub Statistics 2026: Users, Developers and Copilot Data

GitHub reported 225 million users on Microsoft’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call in July 2026, the largest figure the platform has ever disclosed. Two other official GitHub sources published different numbers in the same window, and all three are correct, because each counts a different population. GitHub’s own Innovation Graph dataset put developer accounts at 192,326,991 in the first quarter of 2026, while the Octoverse annual report described more than 180 million developers as of October 2025.

The gap between the largest and the smallest of those figures is roughly 45 million. It is a measurement difference rather than a contradiction. The GitHub statistics below are drawn only from those first-party disclosures, Microsoft’s investor transcripts and GitHub’s own open datasets.

Key Takeaways

• GitHub added over 36 million new developers in a single year, its fastest absolute growth on record.
• Developer accounts worldwide have grown from 45,478,340 in the first quarter of 2020 to 192,326,991 six years later, a compounding rate no other developer platform discloses.
• Microsoft says over 90% of the Fortune 500 use GitHub, and that one in three pull requests on the platform now involves an agent.
• GitHub Copilot reached 50 million users by July 2026, up from over 4.7 million paid subscribers disclosed six months earlier.
• India added more than 5.2 million developers in 2025, a little over 14% of all new accounts worldwide.
• Critical vulnerability fix times fell from 37 to 26 days, the first year GitHub has reported remediation keeping pace with build velocity.

Editor’s Choice

• GitHub hosts 630 million total repositories, having added 121 million new repositories in its biggest year yet.
• Developers merged 43.2 million pull requests a month on average, up 23% YoY.
• GitHub users pushed nearly 1 billion commits across the year.
• Public and open source repositories carried 1.12 billion public and open source contributions.
• TypeScript gained roughly 1,054,015 contributors year over year, overtaking Python for the top spot.
• Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock when the platform had more than 28 million developers.

How Many Users Does GitHub Have?

• Microsoft’s most recent disclosure puts GitHub at 225 million users, counting every account type on the platform.
• GitHub’s Innovation Graph counts 192,326,991 developer accounts, a narrower metric that excludes users that are bots or otherwise flagged as “spammy” within internal systems.
• The Octoverse annual report described 180 million-plus developers at publication, an older reading than either figure above.
• Enterprise share runs high: over 90% of the Fortune 500 are on the platform.
• The spread across the three figures is roughly 45 million accounts, which is why a single headline number is misleading without its definition.

About This Data

Every figure below comes from 30 captured primary sources. 28 are Tier 1: GitHub’s own reports and open datasets, Microsoft investor-relations transcripts and press releases, and GitLab’s audited results. Two are Tier 2, both from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey.

Compilation runs from June 2018 to July 2026, and a source is qualified only if it is an official first-party disclosure. Figures are updated when these sources publish new editions.

Source: Microsoft Investor Relations 2026, GitHub Innovation Graph 2026, GitHub Octoverse 2025

The reconciliation matters more than the headline. Compare GitHub to a rival on “users,” and you are comparing an all-accounts number against whatever definition that rival happens to publish. The two are rarely the same shape.

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GitHub Developer Growth by Year and the 2030 Outlook

• Developer accounts stood at 9,763,122 in the United States and 4,194,257 in India at the start of the Innovation Graph series.
• Six years later, the same two economies recorded 32,410,529 and 26,727,004 developer accounts.
• GitHub credits pricing: The release of GitHub Copilot Free in late 2024 coincided with a step-change in developer sign-ups, exceeding prior projections.
• GitHub’s own regression model projects India at 57.5 million developers by 2030.
• The United States is modeled second at more than 40 million developers, while Brazil, Japan and the United Kingdom complete the top five at 19.6, 11.7 and 11 million developers respectively.

That six-year climb is the base rate GitHub extrapolates forward. The next chart carries the same two lead economies, plus the rest of the top five, out to a 2030 projection.

Key finding: GitHub’s developer base has roughly quadrupled in six years, from 45,478,340 accounts in the first quarter of 2020 to 192,326,991 in the first quarter of 2026, per GitHub’s own Innovation Graph. India’s own base grew 6.4 times across the same seven first quarters.

Recent Developments

• July 2026: Microsoft told investors that GitHub now has 225 million users, the company’s largest published figure for the platform.
• July 2026: Microsoft disclosed that Copilot revenue accelerated over 60% quarter-over-quarter after the billing change.
• June 2026: Usage-based pricing took effect, and margins improved through the quarter with the June business model change to usage-based pricing.
• April 2026: Microsoft said nearly 140,000 organizations now use GitHub Copilot, and enterprise subscribers have nearly tripled year over year.
• April 2026: The same call reported rapid adoption of GitHub Copilot CLI, with usage nearly doubling month-over-month.
• March 2026: GitLab, the closest listed comparator, posted Total revenue of $955.2 million, up 26% year-over-year.

GitHub Developers by Country

• The United States led every economy with 32,410,529 developer accounts in the first quarter of 2026.
• India ranked second at 26,727,004 accounts, within roughly 6 million of the United States.
• China placed third at 11,351,939, well behind the top two despite its population.
• Brazil reached 8,317,960 developer accounts, the largest base in Latin America.
• As a bloc, the European Union recorded 26,953,868 accounts, which would place it second.
• GitHub reports that India, Brazil, and Indonesia have more than quadrupled the number of developers on the platform since 2020.

Crypto and blockchain developers sit inside this population rather than alongside it, which is why platform-level counts move earlier than any sector-specific census. Country ranking also tracks where financial software gets built, and India’s position two places above Germany and Japan is the clearest example.

Developer Growth in Emerging Financial Markets

• Nigeria held 173,641 developer accounts at the start of the series and 1,794,519 six years later.
• Nigeria’s developer base multiplied roughly 10.3 times over the period, the fastest compounding rate in the cohort.
• Pakistan moved from 317,224 accounts to 2,497,496.
• Singapore, a financial centre, not a population centre, went from 302,591 to 2,170,580.
• The United Arab Emirates rose from 95,190 to 656,185.
• GitHub names the driver directly: Brazil, in particular, is benefiting from activity investment in fintech and open banking.

Payments infrastructure in these markets is API first. The build-out tends to surface as developer accounts well before it surfaces as transaction volume. Brazil is the cleanest test of that sequencing, because GitHub names open banking as a driver and the country’s open banking adoption data covers the same period.

For a finance audience, the ranking is a supply-side signal, not a technology curiosity. Developer headcount is where a payments corridor gets built before it clears a single transaction. It is also measurable quarterly, while adoption surveys lag by a year.

India’s trajectory is the one most tightly coupled to a live payments system. Its UPI transaction data expanded across the same six years the developer base multiplied more than six times over.

GitHub Activity and Productivity Statistics

• Developers merged an average of 43.2 million pull requests a month in 2025, up from 35 million the previous year.
• Monthly code pushes rose from 65 million to 82.19 million.
• Issues closed per month climbed from roughly 3.4 million to 4.25 million.
• Pull requests created grew 20.4%, from 39.5 million to 47.5 million over the same period.
• Not every signal rose: Comments on commits: down 27%.

GitHub Statistics on Repositories and Code Volume

• The platform holds 630 million total repositories across public and private projects.
• GitHub added 121 million new repositories in what it called its biggest year yet.
• Private repositories grew by 58 million, an increase of 33%.
• Public and open source repositories numbered 395 million, up 19% YoY.
• Most repositories are open: 63% of all repositories are open source or public.
• Contribution volume runs the other way, with 81.5% of contributions happening in private repositories.

That split explains a persistent misreading of GitHub data. Public repository counts describe the commons that everything depends on, while the bulk of day-to-day engineering happens where nobody can see it. GitHub frames the dependency directly, noting that public projects supply the libraries, models, and workflows that power the broader ecosystem.

Enterprise migration to hosted development sits behind the private-repository curve, and the same pressure shows up in cloud computing in financial services data over the same period.

AI Project Growth on GitHub

• More than 1.1 million public repositories now use an LLM SDK.
• Of those, 693,867 were created in the past 12 months alone, up 178% YoY.
• Adoption starts immediately, with 80% of new developers on GitHub using Copilot in their first week.
• Repositories containing a Jupyter Notebook rose to 2.42 million from 1.4 million a year earlier.
• Dockerfile-bearing repositories grew from 875,000 to 1.9 million, up 120%.
• GitHub ties that to agent workloads, calling it likely fueled by the need to sandbox agents and LLMs.

The same tooling shift is visible inside regulated industries, where AI adoption across banking has followed a comparable curve on a slower compliance clock.

GitHub Copilot Statistics

• Microsoft reported over 4.7 million paid Copilot subscribers, up 75% year-over-year in January 2026.
• Individual tiers grew fastest that quarter, with Copilot Pro+ subs for individual devs increased 77% quarter-over-quarter.
• Three months later, nearly 140,000 organizations now use GitHub Copilot.
• By July 2026, the company said GitHub Copilot now has 50 million users, a total-user figure rather than a paid-seat count.
• Revenue followed the pricing change, with Copilot revenue accelerating over 60% quarter-over-quarter.
• Agentic use is now measurable at platform scale: one in three pull requests on GitHub now involves an agent.

Source: Microsoft Investor Relations earnings calls, FY26 Q2 to Q4

Microsoft changes the disclosed metric almost every quarter, so the series only reads as a trajectory when the three calls are put side by side. Paid subscribers, organizations, and total users are three different denominators, and none of them is revenue, which Microsoft has never broken out for GitHub.

Which Big Companies Use GitHub?

Microsoft says over 90% of the Fortune 500 choose GitHub for AI-powered development. The one enterprise it named is Siemens, which is going all in on GitHub, adopting the full platform to increase developer productivity, after a successful Copilot rollout to 30,000 of its developers.

By the numbers: GitHub Copilot went from 4.7 million paid subscribers in January 2026 to 50 million total users by July, per Microsoft’s own earnings calls. Those two figures count different populations, and the June switch to usage-based billing sits between them, which is why the revenue line moved faster than either count.

Most Used Programming Languages on GitHub

• TypeScript added roughly 1,054,015 contributors year over year, up 66.63%.
• Python placed second with roughly 850,579 added contributors, up 48.78%.
• JavaScript gained roughly 427,148 contributors, a 24.79% gain.
• Java and C# each held enterprise ground, adding roughly 174,705 and roughly 136,735 contributors.
• The ranking flipped for the first time: TypeScript overtook both Python and JavaScript in August 2025 to become the most used language on GitHub.
• GitHub calls it the most significant language shift in more than a decade.

Independent survey data points in the same way on preference rather than volume. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey found that Jira steps down as the most desired tool for code documentation and collaboration, and the new top desired tool is GitHub.

GitHub Security Statistics

• Critical vulnerability fix time fell from 37 to 26 days.
• GitHub recorded 30% faster fixes of critical severity vulnerabilities with 26% fewer repositories receiving critical alerts.
• Dependabot reached 2.668 million projects with the tool enabled in repository settings, up 24.27% year over year.
• Repositories defining Dependabot behaviour in a config file more than doubled this year (846,000, up 137% YoY).
• Broken Access Control is now the top alert, flagged in 151,000-plus repositories.
• Governance lags the code: Only 1 in 50 repositories ships with a Code of Conduct.

Source: GitHub Octoverse 2025

What Are the Disadvantages of GitHub?

The measurable weaknesses are governance and remediation coverage rather than platform capability. GitHub’s own data shows only 1 in 50 repositories ships with a Code of Conduct, and Broken Access Control alerts rose sharply, flagged in 151,000-plus repositories. Concentration is the other structural drawback: one vendor now hosts the majority of the world’s source code and its dependency graph.

GitHub vs GitLab

• GitLab posted Total revenue of $955.2 million, up 26% year-over-year for fiscal 2026.
• Its fourth quarter alone brought Total revenue of $260.4 million, up 23% year-over-year.
• GitLab’s finance chief said Fiscal year 2026 saw GitLab cross $1 billion in ARR and deliver $220 million of free cash flow.
• Microsoft discloses no GitHub revenue line, reporting only that GitHub now has 225 million users.
• On adoption breadth, the one shared dimension, Microsoft claims over 90% of the Fortune 500.
• GitLab’s non-GAAP operating margin reached non-GAAP operating margin of 21% in the fourth quarter.

Source: Microsoft FY26 Q4 earnings call, GitLab fiscal 2026 results

Who Is Bigger, GitLab or GitHub?

On every publicly comparable measure, GitHub is larger, though only GitLab publishes financials. Microsoft reports 225 million users against GitLab’s fiscal 2026 revenue of $955.2 million. One real limit applies here: Microsoft never breaks out GitHub revenue, so a like-for-like financial ranking is not possible from public filings.

Why Are People Moving Away From GitHub?

No primary source quantifies migration away from GitHub, and its user figures rose across every period examined here. Disclosures do show a viable alternative: GitLab crossed $1 billion in ARR the same year. Concentration risk and self-hosting are the usual arguments, and the June 2026 billing change is the most recent pricing event on record.

Who Owns GitHub and What Changed

• Microsoft agreed to buy GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock.
• At the announcement, the platform had more than 28 million developers, against 225 million users reported eight years later.
• Microsoft described GitHub then as the world’s leading software development platform.
• The chief executive announced his exit, writing I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again.
• Reporting lines changed with him: GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization.
• He put the platform at more than 1 billion repos and forks, and over 150 million developers on his way out.

Source: Microsoft news releases and GitHub blog, 2018 to 2026

Is GitHub Still Owned by Microsoft?

Yes. Microsoft’s June 2018 announcement set the price at $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock, and the company has never divested. Reporting lines tightened rather than loosened in 2025, when GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, moving the unit inside Microsoft’s AI engineering group rather than running it at arm’s length.

What Happened to the GitHub CEO?

Thomas Dohmke stepped down. He wrote that my startup roots have begun tugging on me and he’s decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again, and said he would stay through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition. GitHub has since operated inside Microsoft’s CoreAI organization.

Conclusion

Across every source examined here, the GitHub statistics converge on one caveat and three official counts: 225 million users by Microsoft’s measure, 192,326,991 developer accounts by GitHub’s own bot-filtered dataset, and more than 180 million developers in the Octoverse annual report. Around those figures, the platform added over 36 million developers in a year, merged 43.2 million pull requests a month, and pushed nearly 1 billion commits.

For anyone tracking financial technology, the per-economy data is the part that repays attention. Developer accounts are published quarterly; they lead the products those developers build, and the markets compounding fastest on GitHub are the same ones rewriting their payment rails. That makes GitHub’s open dataset a rare forward-looking input on a topic where most evidence arrives a year late.