Software Collaboration Hits 5 Billion GitHub Commits

Digital projects and coding communities have become a foundational layer of modern innovation. Behind almost every frontier technology, from artificial intelligence (AI) models and cloud services to electric vehicles, medical devices, and digital public infrastructure, lies code written, reviewed and iterated on collaborative platforms. Among other networks, GitHub is the world's largest platform for hosting and coordinating collaborative code-based projects, providing a granular and near real-time view of where this activity is taking place and how quickly it is scaling.

In this April 2026 edition of the GII Innovation Insights blog, as well as in the GII itself, the GII team collaborates with GitHub to understand the geography of code-based projects over the past years, using GitHub commits, the core unit of contribution to a digital project. A GitHub commit is a saved version of changes made to a digital project, allowing contributors to track updates and changes to the project. GitHub commits can serve as a useful proxy for coding development activity.  

The key findings are:

• Global GitHub commits reached close to 5 billion in 2025, up from around 1.7 billion in 2019, a nearly threefold increase in just seven years (see Figure 1).
• Growth has been steady, averaging close to 19% per year, with no interruption from the post-pandemic slowdown.
• The United States continues to lead by a wide margin, with more than 1 billion commits in 2025, close to a quarter of global activity, followed by India, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan (see Table 1).
• Middle-income economies are rising fast. India is now the second-largest source of GitHub commits globally, and Brazil, Indonesia, and Viet Nam have all entered the top 15.
• The fastest-growing world region is Central and Southern Asia, whose commit volume is close to 7 times its 2019 level, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa and Northern Africa and Western Asia (see Figure 3).
• On a per-capita basis, small and highly connected economies lead: Singapore, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, and Norway all generate several million commits per million working-age inhabitants (see Table 2).

Looking beyond the headline numbers, what stands out in Figure 1 is the continuity of this expansion year after year. GitHub commits grew from roughly 1.7 billion in 2019 to approximately 2.1 billion in 2020 (with no slowdown during the COVID-19 pandemic) and kept climbing through 2022–2023. In 2024 and 2025, growth accelerated again, coinciding with the broad deployment of generative AI coding assistants, the expansion of cloud-native development, and the rise of open-source AI model ecosystems.

Figure 1 Global Trends in GitHub Commits (Sent and Received), 2019-2025

Europe and Northern America remain the two largest contributors to global commits activity, but their combined share has been gradually declining in relative terms, as other regions scale up (Figure 2). In 2019, Europe and Northern America together accounted for close to 80% of global commits; by 2025, that share is closer to 60%. Most of this redistribution was absorbed by Central and Southern Asia, which rose from 5.3% to 12.8% of global commits, and South-eastern Asia, Eastern Asia and Oceania, which rose from 10.1% to 16.2%. Together, these two regions account for about three-quarters of the shift. Within Central and Southern Asia, the change is driven overwhelmingly by India, whose share of global commits more than doubled from 3.9% to 9.4%. The shift in South-eastern Asia, Eastern Asia and Oceania is more distributed, with the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and Viet Nam each roughly doubling their global share between 2019 and 2025.

Figure 2 Share of Commits per Region, 2019-2025

When looking at commit growth since 2019 (Figure 3), this rebalancing becomes more visible. Central and Southern Asia leads the way, with commit volumes close to 7 times their 2019 level by 2025. India is the largest contributor in the region, reflecting its role as a global software development hub, as well as the rapid expansion of developer bases in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Sub-Saharan Africa and Northern Africa and Western Asia follow closely, both more than 5 times their 2019 level, driven by economies such as Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa in the former, and Egypt, Morocco, Türkiye, and the United Arab Emirates in the latter. GitHub commits from South-East Asia, East Asia and Oceania have grown by more than 4.5 times, driven by leading activity in Indonesia, Viet Nam, and the Republic of Korea. In 2025, GitHub commits from Latin America and the Caribbean were around 4 times their 2019 level, led by Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.

Figure 3 Regional Growth in GitHub Commits, Indexed (2019 = 100)

The United States continues to lead the global ranking of GitHub commits by a wide margin, with over 1.06 billion commits in 2025, roughly 22% of the global total. India ranks second with close to 446 million commits, reflecting both the scale of its developer population and its deepening integration into global open-source and code-based projects ecosystems (Table 1).

Together, the top 15 economies account for about two-thirds of global commit activity. Europe has strong representation in the top 15, with six economies in the lead: Germany (3rd, 253 million), the United Kingdom (4th, 183 million), France (6th, 151 million), the Netherlands (10th, 95 million), Spain (12th, 87 million), and the Russian Federation (15th, 77 million). South-East Asia, East Asia and Oceania follow with five economies, led by Japan (5th, 158 million), the Republic of Korea (8th, 139 million), Singapore (11th, 93 million), Indonesia (13th, 85 million) and Viet Nam (14th, 79 million). Brazil leads in Latin America and the Caribbean (7th, 145 million).

Table 1 Economies by GitHub Commits (Sent and Received), 2025

When commit activity is scaled by working-age population (15–69 years old), highly open and highly digitalized economies lead (Table 2). Singapore leads the world with close to 20 million commits per million working-age inhabitants in 2025, around two and a half times the level of the second-placed economy. It is followed by the Netherlands (7.3 million), Switzerland (7.2 million), Finland (6.5 million), Sweden (5.9 million), Norway (5.6 million), Israel (5.1 million), Iceland (5 million), Denmark (4.9 million), and Estonia (4.9 million).

Table 2 Economies by GitHub Commits per Million Working-Age Population (15–69), 2025

Background

The Global Innovation Index includes a pillar on Knowledge and Technology Outputs (Pillar 7), with three sub-pillars covering knowledge creation (7.1), knowledge impact (7.2) and knowledge diffusion (7.3). Sub-pillar 7.3 includes indicator 7.3.2, GitHub commits per million population, 15–69. GitHub is the world's largest host of source code, and a commit is the term used for a change on this platform. One or more commits can be saved, or pushed, to projects, also called repositories. The indicator therefore measures the sum of commit pushes received and sent by publicly available projects on GitHub within a given economy, normalized by the population aged 15–69 to approximate the potentially active developer pool. Automated activity that would result in non-productive commits is excluded from the count. The reference year used in this post is 2024–2025. Refer to Global Innovation Index Appendix III - Sources and Definitions, for more information.