GitHub’s 2026 Octoverse reports record activity as developers build with agents

GitHub’s annual report describes a sharp midyear rise in activity, growing use of coding agents and more projects in fields beyond software, including health care and agriculture.

Developers pushed code to GitHub 17.9 billion times in the past 12 months – more than in 2024 and 2025 combined, according to GitHub’s 2026 Octoverse report. Commits across public and private repositories reached 34.3 billion, more than triple the level two years earlier. Merged pull requests also more than tripled over that period, to 1.3 billion, or an average of 3.5 million a day.

This is reported by GitHub.

GitHub’s telemetry shows activity rising from January and accelerating around June, as developers began working alongside agents more often. The report points to improved underlying models, new tools built around them, and agents that can track progress over several days, coordinate with specialized agents and run tasks remotely in the cloud as well as on local machines.

Among repositories created this year, those with an agent configuration file averaged eight times as many commits as new repositories without one. From June onward, about 55% of all commits came from brand-new repositories. Developers active on GitHub in the past 12 months had been on the platform for an average of 36 months; of those who opened a pull request in August, more than 75% pushed code in September. Developers also worked across an average of 10% more repositories than a year earlier.

Automation also grew. GitHub Actions ran 1,440 jobs per second this year – 124 million a day and more than three times last year’s total. Developers merged more than 30 million Dependabot pull requests to update dependencies and reduce the use of known vulnerabilities, about double the 2025 pace.

Public contributions reached 2.5 billion in 2026, more than double last year’s 1.12 billion. Among the contributors highlighted in the report, @kinlane made more than 1 million contributions across public repositories, using agentic workflows to maintain a machine-readable catalog of public API information. @kim-em made more than 178,000 contributions while maintaining mathlib, a community library of computer-checked mathematics. @andig, a maintainer of the open-source EV charging controller and home energy management system evcc, contributed more than 21,000 times.

GitHub now serves more than 225 million developers. The United States, with 38.3 million, and India, with 32 million, remain the largest developer communities; each added more than 10 million developers this year. Brazil added 3.28 million, the third-largest increase of any country.

Last year, GitHub projected that India would have 57.5 million developers by 2030 and the United States 54.7 million. One year into that five-year forecast period, every country in the projections had covered at least a fifth of the distance to its 2030 figure. The United States had covered 38.6% and India 28.3%.

Longer-range forecasts are less settled. GitHub ran more than 40 time-series and regression models based on historical sign-up and usage data, projecting developer growth through 2031 at different rates. About half forecast “extreme” growth, with developer numbers more than tripling; just under half forecast “substantial” growth, from double to triple. Only three models projected growth below 2x. GitHub says the wide range reflects how the 2026 surge expanded what is plausible, while the overall trend points to developer communities growing in more places.

The report also examines public repositories by industry, using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). A language model classified random samples of repositories created each year from 2022 to 2026 according to their names, descriptions, topics and README files. GitHub also tracked whether repositories mentioned AI and whether an agent had opened a pull request against them.

In administrative and support services, mining, health care and agriculture, more than four in 10 repositories mentioned AI, but fewer than 3% had agent-opened pull requests. Construction differed: about a quarter of its repositories mentioned AI and about 9% had agent-opened pull requests, the highest share of any sector. Manufacturing ranked next on that measure.

Professional, scientific and technical services moved from fourth to second among industries, behind information. Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting rose two places; finance and insurance, and health care and social assistance, each rose one. Compared with their 2022 baselines, mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction grew roughly 65 times from a small starting base; administrative and support services and construction grew 17 to 18 times; manufacturing, the slowest-growing of these sectors, almost tripled. Professional, scientific and technical services grew about five times.

The report describes projects built by people working in their own fields: a manufacturing team made software that turns a tool photo into a custom-fit, 3D-printable drawer organizer; a health-care research lab improved analysis of digital tissue scans; and a Copenhagen university lab built a system to classify videos of chickens playing. A University of Waikato energy center created a toolkit to help industrial plants identify reusable heat, while Bulgaria’s digital ministry open-sourced a portal for tracking public-contract winners and amounts. A novelist also built a free app that formats a manuscript like a book as the author types.

GitHub cites open code as part of research across disciplines. In biochemistry, work behind AlphaFold earned Demis Hassabis and John Jumper a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Tensor2Tensor accompanied the computer-science paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture used by today’s large language models. The sars-cov-2-stability repository held code and data for an early paper on how long the virus survives in air and on surfaces. In physics, eht-imaging was one of two open-source libraries used to reconstruct the first image of a black hole.

By September 2026, more than 40% of pull requests on GitHub began with an agent’s first draft, up from 17% in March. That amounted to 110 million pull requests in September, about six times March’s volume.

The report also highlights projects responding to local needs, including Gati, a Nepali-first relay of official disaster alerts that grew from a flood bulletin built on GitHub Pages. Its verified information covers roads, rescue, weather and power, and the service runs on GitHub Pages and Actions. Other examples include software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed to run programs aboard spacecraft and open-source firmware that lets e-reader owners customize their devices.