[1/3] Octoverse 2026: Methodology, Scale, and Geography

GitHub released its annual Octoverse 2026 report on October 28. I've previously covered Octoverse 2025 and compared the reports for 2023–2025, so let's keep following the ecosystem. We'll start with who and what GitHub counted.

🔎 Methodology

The report draws on GitHub telemetry, in the form of repository events. That's what makes it interesting: you can see what people do on the platform, though the reasons for their decisions aren't directly visible in the data.
– Period: October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026.
– Public and private repositories are included by default. Open-source and industry metrics cover public repositories only.
– GitHub recalculated the 2024 and 2025 figures using the new definitions and observation window. For comparisons, use the new report's figures. They won't simply line up with numbers from previous posts.

There's another useful distinction. A push can contain several commits, while contributions also include PRs, issues, comments, and reviews. It would be odd to add those counters together as a “volume of code written.” They describe different actions.

📈 Scale

According to GitHub, during the reporting year there were:
– 17.9 billion pushes, up from 6.7 billion the previous year.
– 34.3 billion commits, up from 12.9 billion.
– 1.3 billion merged PRs, up from 538 million.
– 45.4 billion GitHub Actions jobs, up from 14 billion.

Actions jobs grew faster than the other measures on the list: about 3.2×, compared with 2.7× for commits and pushes and 2.4× for merged PRs. As the number of code changes rises, more automation runs alongside them.

🌍 Geography: where the community is growing

GitHub reports more than 225 million developers. The US (38.3 million) and India (32 million) have the largest communities, followed by China (12.4 million) and Brazil (10.2 million). Russia has 5.07 million. The US and India each added more than 10 million developers, and Brazil added 3.28 million. Locations come from users' profiles. I wouldn't read these figures as a census of working engineers in each country.

In the next part, we'll look at languages, industries, and open source: what the community builds and which projects it gathers around.

#Engineering #Software #OpenSource #Metrics #DevOps