180 million-plus developers now work and build on GitHub.
Their definition is “[a]nyone with a GitHub account.” Let’s not overthink it, just yet, and instead go with what they’re saying.
If 2025 had a theme, it would be growth. Every second, more than one new developer on average joined GitHub–over 36 million in the past year. It’s our fastest absolute growth rate yet and 180 million-plus developers now work and build on GitHub.
There are at least 180m developers in the world, those are just the developers on GitHub. There are more that are not on GitHub. The first question is how many developers total are there? There are probably not one billion developers. Are there 700m, 500m, 300m developers in the world?
You can do a lot of hair splitting on “developer.” It sounds like there’s some data scientist types in there, are they developers? Do you count tech pubs and product management? I have a GitHub account. And though I have code, I wouldn’t say I’m a developer.
But no one will care for such distinctions. GitHub clarifies the definition in the methodology section. They mean GitHub user, not developers. Did you scroll down to that section at the end before moving onto the fourth sentence?
Furthermore, what they’re saying is that they only have 180m of the total pool of developers. There are more that do not “work and build on GitHub” yet. If their “[e]very second, more than one new developer on average joined GitHub” statement holds, there will be “over 36 million” more by October, 2026. That will be 216m.
So, the phrase you will hear will be “there are over 200 million developers in the world, and growing at one every second.”
In contrast, JetBrains says:
Using our 2023 methodology, we estimated approximately 13.4 million professional developers worldwide. For 2024, our revised model puts the number closer to 19.6 million professional developers globally - a major increase driven by key updates to our methodology.
There are 48.4 million developers around the world.
These are for “professional” developers, and those numbers have had thar shape for awhile.
But 19.6 and 48.4 million is not 200m, or even 180m. And, again, 180m is only the developers on GitHub. We have to assume there are a lot more developers. It feels like “everyone” uses GitHub. Usually a market ends up with three leaders. The top has something like 40%, the second 20%, the third 15%, and then a whole bunch of “other.” So since “everyone” uses GitHub, let’s say they have 50% to 60% of the market.
So, we could say the total number of developers in the world is 360m?
If our new figure is 3.7x to 9.1x what we used to think. This changes everything about how you think about the developer market.
This matters a lot.
For example, if you’re a VC and you used to estimate things based on 48.4m and now you put in 180m, your numbers are going to change dramatically. You’ll expect much more from your startup investments. If you’re raising money for a developer tool business, you now have a much bigger number you’re going after.
Since there’s Sales people at Atlassian and GitLab now have a much bigger number to go after.
If you’re a recruiter looking for staff, you now have a much bigger pool of people to hire from. We are told that it is hard to find and hire developers. But if there are 200m to 300m developers in the world, what is the problem?
If you’re an administrator for the CS department at a college, you probably need to double capacity? Someone like JetBrains now has a massive market they can still go after.
The market for OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, etc. is at least $48bn a year: $20 × 12 months × 200,000,000 developers. A developer is going to run out of the tokens they get for $20 a month and upgrade to $100 a month. Now we have a $240bn market.
And so forth.
For “professional developer,” it feels like we still have 20m to 50m. That is a wide spread as well.
Throw in 180m to 360m, and now we’ll have numbers all over the place.
Which number(s) will you be using?
From Octoverse: A new developer joins GitHub every second as AI leads TypeScript to #1.