GitHub Statistics 2026: Top Languages, Most-Starred Repositories and AI
A star is GitHub's bookmark button, and this report reads all 480,428 public repositories with 100 or more stars, forks aside, as of September 2026. Python leads with 19.8% of them, but TypeScript is the language of 18.6% of those started in 2026, up from 1.2% of those started in 2012, and 23.6% of this year's carry an AI topic.
On this page 18 sections
- Python leads GitHub with 19.8% of popular repositories
- TypeScript went from 1.2% to 18.6% of popular repositories started each year
- Almost a quarter of 2026's popular repositories carry an AI topic
- Only 480,428 public GitHub repositories, forks aside, have 100 or more stars
- The top 1% of popular repositories hold a third of their stars
- The most-starred repositories on GitHub
- Swift and Go have the highest median stars
- 2026 has already produced almost as many popular repositories as all of 2025
- Individual developers own two thirds of popular repositories
- The GitHub organisations with the most stars
- The developers with the most stars on GitHub
- MIT covers 35.8% of popular repositories, and 26.8% have no license
- 38.5% of popular repositories have had no push in three years
- For every archived repository, 3.9 more went quiet without being archived
- 89.6% of popular repositories started in 2026 default to main
- A third of popular forks have more stars than the repository they forked
- Frequently asked questions
- Methodology and sources
- Python is the most common language on GitHub's popular repositories, the primary language of 19.8% of the 480,428 public repositories with 100 or more stars, the bookmarks GitHub users give a repository. JavaScript follows at 11.8% and TypeScript at 7.6%.
- TypeScript is the language of 18.6% of the popular repositories started in 2026, up from 1.2% of those started in 2012. Java fell from 7.9% to 1.0% over the same years.
- 23.6% of the popular repositories started in 2026 carry an AI topic, a label the owner sets, 6,046 of them, up from 1.9% of those started in 2016.
- The most common topic on popular repositories started in 2026, among the labels owners set, is claude-code, on 2,025 of them, ahead of ai-agents on 1,675 and ai on 1,524.
- The top 1% of GitHub's popular repositories by stars hold 33.0% of all their stars, and the top 10% hold 67.6%. 127 repositories have 100,000 stars or more.
- Individual developers own 66.4% of GitHub's popular repositories and organisations own 33.6%. Among the popular repositories started in 2026 the organisation share is 25.5%, the lowest of any year since 2010.
- Microsoft's organisation account owns more popular repositories than any other account on GitHub, 1,905 of them holding 4.1 million stars. Google's is second with 1,043.
- 26.8% of GitHub's popular repositories have no license GitHub can detect, 128,584 of them. MIT covers 35.8% and Apache 2.0 covers 12.4%.
- 38.5% of GitHub's popular repositories have had no push in three years, meaning no new commits uploaded to any branch, archived or not: 185,154 of them. For every one its owner has archived, marked read-only, 3.9 more are quiet, with no push in three years and never archived.
- 89.6% of the popular repositories started in 2026 use main as their default branch, the branch a visitor sees first, against 12.9% of those started in 2019.
Python leads GitHub with 19.8% of popular repositories
Python is the primary language of 95,056 of GitHub's 480,428 public repositories with 100 or more stars, 19.8% of them. JavaScript is second at 11.8% and TypeScript third at 7.6%. Counted by people rather than repositories, TypeScript is first: GitHub's Octoverse 2025 report found it passed Python and JavaScript in August 2025 as the language with the most monthly contributors, and credits AI-assisted coding.
A popular repository, in every figure below, is a public repository with 100 or more stars that is not a fork: 480,428 of them, the top 1.49% of the 32.2 million public repositories with any star. Every share in this report is of them unless a chart says otherwise.
Behind the top three the field spreads out: Java is fourth at 5.5%, and GitHub detects 490 distinct primary languages across the set. 7.9% of popular repositories have no detected language.
| Language | Repositories | Share of popular repositories |
|---|---|---|
 Python | 95,056 | 19.8% |
 JavaScript | 56,674 | 11.8% |
 TypeScript | 36,669 | 7.6% |
 Java | 26,584 | 5.5% |
 C++ | 25,615 | 5.3% |
 Go | 21,581 | 4.5% |
 C | 18,605 | 3.9% |
 C# | 15,576 | 3.2% |
 Rust | 13,796 | 2.9% |
 HTML | 12,361 | 2.6% |
 Shell | 12,325 | 2.6% |
 PHP | 11,986 | 2.5% |
 Jupyter Notebook | 11,510 | 2.4% |
 Swift | 8,552 | 1.8% |
 Ruby | 7,655 | 1.6% |
 Kotlin | 6,863 | 1.4% |
 Objective-C | 6,737 | 1.4% |
 CSS | 4,900 | 1.0% |
 Vue | 3,969 | 0.8% |
 Dart | 3,829 | 0.8% |
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Python has more popular repositories than any other language, and the three leaders together hold nearly two in five.
TypeScript went from 1.2% to 18.6% of popular repositories started each year
| Year started | Python | JavaScript | TypeScript | Java | C++ | Go | C | Ruby | Rust | PHP | Other languages | No detected language |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 7.1% | 9.6% | 0.2% | 3.2% | 3.0% | 0.0% | 6.2% | 49.3% | 0.1% | 2.2% | 17.3% | 1.9% |
| 2009 | 14.0% | 11.1% | 0.2% | 6.1% | 4.3% | 0.7% | 6.9% | 25.1% | 0.0% | 5.7% | 24.0% | 1.7% |
| 2010 | 12.4% | 18.2% | 0.7% | 7.1% | 5.4% | 0.7% | 8.0% | 12.8% | 0.0% | 6.7% | 25.9% | 2.1% |
| 2011 | 12.5% | 19.8% | 0.9% | 7.8% | 5.7% | 1.0% | 6.8% | 9.3% | 0.2% | 7.1% | 26.3% | 2.5% |
| 2012 | 12.5% | 20.7% | 1.2% | 7.9% | 5.8% | 2.1% | 6.9% | 6.5% | 0.2% | 6.3% | 26.8% | 3.1% |
| 2013 | 11.3% | 20.4% | 1.4% | 8.4% | 6.4% | 3.4% | 5.9% | 4.4% | 0.4% | 5.6% | 28.6% | 3.8% |
| 2014 | 11.2% | 19.0% | 1.7% | 9.2% | 6.2% | 4.6% | 5.4% | 2.8% | 0.9% | 4.7% | 29.1% | 5.2% |
| 2015 | 11.2% | 17.5% | 2.9% | 10.1% | 6.4% | 4.5% | 5.2% | 1.7% | 1.4% | 3.9% | 29.3% | 5.9% |
| 2016 | 12.9% | 16.7% | 4.4% | 10.3% | 5.8% | 4.7% | 4.0% | 1.2% | 1.5% | 3.2% | 28.7% | 6.7% |
| 2017 | 16.5% | 15.1% | 5.3% | 8.2% | 5.7% | 4.9% | 3.8% | 0.8% | 1.6% | 2.6% | 28.5% | 7.0% |
| 2018 | 19.1% | 12.4% | 6.0% | 6.2% | 5.8% | 5.3% | 3.6% | 0.6% | 2.1% | 2.3% | 28.6% | 8.1% |
| 2019 | 20.5% | 10.2% | 7.0% | 5.0% | 5.7% | 5.2% | 3.4% | 0.6% | 2.8% | 2.0% | 28.8% | 8.8% |
| 2020 | 20.6% | 9.0% | 8.5% | 3.9% | 5.6% | 5.2% | 3.5% | 0.5% | 3.4% | 1.8% | 28.8% | 9.3% |
| 2021 | 21.1% | 7.8% | 9.7% | 3.2% | 5.5% | 5.1% | 3.7% | 0.4% | 4.0% | 1.4% | 28.2% | 10.0% |
| 2022 | 21.7% | 6.3% | 10.8% | 2.9% | 5.4% | 5.1% | 3.4% | 0.3% | 5.1% | 1.3% | 26.8% | 10.7% |
| 2023 | 28.2% | 5.6% | 11.5% | 2.3% | 4.7% | 4.0% | 2.9% | 0.3% | 4.6% | 1.1% | 24.6% | 10.3% |
| 2024 | 30.8% | 5.2% | 12.2% | 2.1% | 4.5% | 3.8% | 2.6% | 0.3% | 4.7% | 0.9% | 23.0% | 9.9% |
| 2025 | 32.5% | 6.4% | 15.8% | 1.6% | 3.5% | 4.5% | 2.3% | 0.3% | 4.7% | 0.8% | 18.7% | 8.7% |
| 2026 | 29.3% | 8.1% | 18.6% | 1.0% | 2.6% | 4.4% | 1.9% | 0.1% | 6.2% | 0.3% | 17.8% | 9.6% |
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TypeScript is the language of 18.6% of the popular repositories started in 2026, against 8.5% of those started in 2020 and 1.2% of those started in 2012. Language is the one GitHub detects today, not the one a project started in.
TypeScript gained the most share; Rust grew the most in proportion, from 0.2% to 6.2% over the same years. Python went from 12.5% to 29.3%, after peaking at 32.5% in 2025.
JavaScript was 20.7% of the popular repositories started in 2012 and is 8.1% of those started in 2026, and Java fell from 7.9% to 1.0%.
Each era had its own leader. 49.3% of the popular repositories started in 2008 were written in Ruby, the language of Ruby on Rails. JavaScript led every year from 2010 to 2016, Python has led every year since 2017, TypeScript has been second every year since 2021, and Rust has held a place in the top five since 2023.
TypeScript is more common among 2026's AI repositories: 24.6% of those with an AI topic against 16.7% of the rest. Python and TypeScript together are 56.9% of that year's AI repositories.
The popular repositories started in 2026 lean further toward TypeScript than any earlier year's, and Ruby and PHP are 0.1% and 0.3% of them.
Almost a quarter of 2026's popular repositories carry an AI topic
23.6% of the popular repositories started in 2026 carry at least one AI topic, 6,046 of them. The share was 5.4% or less every year from 2015 to 2022, doubled to 11.7% in 2023, the first full year after ChatGPT, and reached 16.2% in 2025.
| Topic | Repositories started in 2026 | Share of them |
|---|---|---|
| claude-code | 2,025 | 7.9% |
| ai-agents | 1,675 | 6.5% |
| ai | 1,524 | 5.9% |
| llm | 1,510 | 5.9% |
| codex | 1,186 | 4.6% |
| mcp | 1,184 | 4.6% |
| claude | 1,001 | 3.9% |
| developer-tools | 943 | 3.7% |
| typescript | 938 | 3.7% |
| python | 915 | 3.6% |
| cli | 888 | 3.5% |
| ai-agent | 877 | 3.4% |
| rust | 823 | 3.2% |
| open-source | 739 | 2.9% |
| agent-skills | 668 | 2.6% |
| agent | 667 | 2.6% |
| macos | 660 | 2.6% |
| self-hosted | 629 | 2.5% |
| react | 539 | 2.1% |
| skills | 536 | 2.1% |
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The most common topic among 2026's popular repositories is claude-code, on 2,025 of them, ahead of ai-agents on 1,675, ai on 1,524 and llm on 1,510.
OpenAI's Codex appears on 1,186, the Model Context Protocol on 1,184 and Claude on 1,001.
Topics are set by each repository's owner and only 50.2% of popular repositories set any, so every AI share here is a floor. Almost a quarter of this year's popular repositories carry an AI topic, and claude-code, named after Anthropic's coding agent, is the most common topic of all.
Only 480,428 public GitHub repositories, forks aside, have 100 or more stars
| Stars | Public repositories | Share of repositories with a star |
|---|---|---|
| Any, including none | 252,281,162 | |
| 1 or more | 32,209,687 | 100% |
| 10 or more | 2,879,350 | 8.94% |
| 50 or more | 831,649 | 2.58% |
| 100 or more | 480,428 | 1.49% |
| 500 or more | 123,382 | 0.383% |
| 1,000 or more | 64,906 | 0.202% |
| 5,000 or more | 12,608 | 0.0391% |
| 10,000 or more | 5,586 | 0.0173% |
| 50,000 or more | 496 | 0.00154% |
| 100,000 or more | 127 | 0.000394% |
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Only 480,428 public repositories on GitHub have 100 or more stars, not counting forks, and they are the ones this report measures. Below the bar, 2.9 million have 10 or more stars and 32.2 million have at least one. Above it, 64,906 have 1,000 or more and 127 have 100,000 or more.
GitHub search counts 252.3 million public repositories that are not forks, and about seven in eight of them have no stars at all. A hundred stars is a far higher bar than the round number suggests.
The top 1% of popular repositories hold a third of their stars
| Stars | Repositories | Share of repositories | Stars held | Share of all stars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100,000+ | 127 | 0.03% | 22,369,715 | 5.34% |
| 10,000 to 99,999 | 5,459 | 1.14% | 124,073,510 | 29.63% |
| 1,000 to 9,999 | 59,320 | 12.35% | 156,369,463 | 37.34% |
| 500 to 999 | 58,476 | 12.17% | 40,698,779 | 9.72% |
| 100 to 499 | 357,046 | 74.32% | 75,251,244 | 17.97% |
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GitHub's 480,428 popular repositories hold 418.8 million stars between them. The top 1% of them by stars hold 33.0% of those stars and the top 10% hold 67.6%. 127 repositories have 100,000 stars or more.
The ten most-starred repositories alone hold 1.0% of all stars, and the top 10,000 hold 43.1%. At the other end, 74.3% of popular repositories have between 100 and 499 stars, and the median popular repository has 232.
Among popular repositories, attention is heavily concentrated: the top tenth collect two thirds of the stars, and three quarters of the set shares less than a fifth.
The most-starred repositories on GitHub
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codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x is the most-starred repository on GitHub with 549,285 stars, a curated list of tutorials for rebuilding well-known software from scratch. sindresorhus/awesome is second with 509,836 and public-apis/public-apis third with 482,820.
Nine of the ten most-starred repositories are reference and learning material: curated lists, free books, study guides, developer roadmaps and freeCodeCamp's curriculum. openclaw/openclaw, an AI assistant started in 2025 with 390,383 stars, is the only application among them.
The most-starred list is mostly things developers save for later rather than things they run.
Swift and Go have the highest median stars
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The median popular Swift repository, the one in the middle when they are sorted by stars, has 271 stars and the median Go repository 270, the highest of any language with 5,000 or more popular repositories.
Every language starts at the same floor of 100 stars, so the median shows how far a typical project gets past it. Python holds 19.2% of every star in the set.
Python, the language with the most popular repositories, has one of the lowest medians, 225 stars, below Swift and Go.
2026 has already produced almost as many popular repositories as all of 2025
| Year started | Repositories with 100+ stars |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 1,065 |
| 2009 | 2,523 |
| 2010 | 4,926 |
| 2011 | 9,158 |
| 2012 | 13,966 |
| 2013 | 19,767 |
| 2014 | 24,898 |
| 2015 | 32,281 |
| 2016 | 36,160 |
| 2017 | 39,980 |
| 2018 | 39,979 |
| 2019 | 39,928 |
| 2020 | 41,269 |
| 2021 | 33,746 |
| 2022 | 30,481 |
| 2023 | 32,184 |
| 2024 | 26,507 |
| 2025 | 25,942 |
| 2026 | 25,667 |
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As of September 2026, 25,667 repositories started this year already have 100 or more stars, 98.9% of the 25,942 started in the whole of 2025. The peak is still 2020, with 41,269.
Older years have had longer to reach 100 stars, so 2026's count is a floor, and it has still nearly matched 2025.
Individual developers own two thirds of popular repositories
| Year started | Share owned by an organisation |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 33.6% |
| 2011 | 37.0% |
| 2012 | 36.0% |
| 2013 | 37.1% |
| 2014 | 38.3% |
| 2015 | 36.2% |
| 2016 | 34.7% |
| 2017 | 32.6% |
| 2018 | 33.2% |
| 2019 | 33.2% |
| 2020 | 33.2% |
| 2021 | 33.3% |
| 2022 | 33.5% |
| 2023 | 32.5% |
| 2024 | 33.2% |
| 2025 | 33.1% |
| 2026 | 25.5% |
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Individual developers own 319,138 of GitHub's popular repositories, 66.4%, and organisations own 161,290, 33.6%.
They are spread across 190.6 thousand personal accounts and 65.2 thousand organisation accounts.
The organisation share was between 32.5% and 38.3% every year from 2010 to 2025. Among the popular repositories started in 2026 it is 25.5%, the lowest of any year since 2010, which is consistent with more individual developers publishing AI projects.
Individual developers own two thirds of popular repositories, and a larger share of this year's than of any earlier year's.
The GitHub organisations with the most stars
| Rank | Organisation | Popular repositories | Stars | Most-starred repository |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 |  Microsoftmicrosoft | 1,905 | 4,121,876 | vscode |
| #2 |  Googlegoogle | 1,043 | 2,098,083 | material-design-icons |
| #3 |  The Apache Software Foundationapache | 624 | 1,373,960 | superset |
| #4 |  OpenAIopenai | 180 | 995,922 | codex |
| #5 |  Meta Researchfacebookresearch | 635 | 953,536 | segment-anything |
| #6 |  Alibabaalibaba | 288 | 917,749 | open-code-review |
| #7 |  GitHubgithub | 205 | 732,402 | gitignore |
| #8 |  Hugging Facehuggingface | 179 | 727,581 | transformers |
| #9 |  DeepSeekdeepseek-ai | 39 | 665,492 | deepseek-harness |
| #10 |  Anthropicanthropics | 63 | 651,972 | skills |
| #11 |  Vuevuejs | 84 | 631,757 | vue |
| #12 |  Metafacebook | 107 | 584,616 | docusaurus |
| #13 |  Tencent | 186 | 566,985 | WeKnora |
| #14 |  CodeCrafterscodecrafters-io | 9 | 551,087 | build-your-own-x |
| #15 |  Vercelvercel | 108 | 529,296 | next.js |
| #16 |  freeCodeCamp.orgfreeCodeCamp | 36 | 522,451 | freeCodeCamp |
| #17 |  react | 8 | 512,942 | react |
| #18 |  tensorflow | 87 | 502,098 | tensorflow |
| #19 |  public-apis | 1 | 482,820 | public-apis |
| #20 |  NVIDIA CorporationNVIDIA | 257 | 471,018 | NemoClaw |
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The Microsoft organisation account leads every organisation on GitHub with 4.1 million stars across 1,905 popular repositories. Google is second with 2.1 million, and third is The Apache Software Foundation with 1.4 million.
By number of popular repositories Microsoft and Google lead as well, and Packt, a publisher, is fifth with 593.
The table ranks accounts, not companies: Meta appears as two of them, Meta Research and Meta.
The developers with the most stars on GitHub
| Rank | Developer | Popular repositories | Stars | Most-starred repository |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | sindresorhus | 457 | 1,063,419 | awesome |
| #2 | karpathy | 51 | 493,130 | autoresearch |
| #3 | donnemartin | 10 | 471,225 | system-design-primer |
| #4 | nilbuild | 24 | 469,301 | developer-roadmap |
| #5 | jwasham | 8 | 375,808 | coding-interview-university |
| #6 | vinta | 9 | 329,371 | awesome-python |
| #7 | mattpocock | 19 | 299,117 | skills |
| #8 | obra | 18 | 297,990 | superpowers |
| #9 | trimstray | 14 | 294,804 | the-book-of-secret-knowledge |
| #10 | 996icu | 1 | 277,208 | 996.ICU |
| #11 | affaan-m | 6 | 269,118 | ECC |
| #12 | torvalds | 9 | 262,009 | linux |
| #13 | trekhleb | 17 | 257,430 | javascript-algorithms |
| #14 | 521xueweihan | 7 | 227,982 | HelloGitHub |
| #15 | ruanyf | 31 | 218,820 | weekly |
| #16 | getify | 26 | 215,337 | You-Dont-Know-JS |
| #17 | jaywcjlove | 58 | 213,660 | awesome-mac |
| #18 | jackfrued | 4 | 201,414 | Python-100-Days |
| #19 | justjavac | 39 | 197,850 | free-programming-books-zh_CN |
| #20 | CyC2018 | 5 | 193,159 | CS-Notes |
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sindresorhus has more stars than any other individual developer on GitHub, 1.1 million across 457 popular repositories, and is also the individual with the most popular repositories. karpathy is second with 493,130 across 51.
By count, keijiro is second with 214 popular repositories and lucidrains third with 175.
The last column names each developer's most-starred repository, and most are lists, study guides and books, with some sets of skills for AI coding agents.
MIT covers 35.8% of popular repositories, and 26.8% have no license
| License | Repositories | Share |
|---|---|---|
| MIT | 171,848 | 35.8% |
| Apache-2.0 | 59,465 | 12.4% |
| GPL-3.0 | 31,152 | 6.5% |
| Other licenses | 46,594 | 9.7% |
| Unrecognised license file | 42,785 | 8.9% |
| No license | 128,584 | 26.8% |
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35.8% of GitHub's popular repositories carry the MIT License, 171,848 of them. Apache 2.0 covers 12.4% and GPL 3.0 6.5%. The copyleft family together, every GPL, AGPL and LGPL version, covers 10.2%.
26.8% have no license GitHub can detect, 128,584 repositories. Under GitHub's own licensing guidance that leaves the code under default copyright: anyone may look at it and fork it on GitHub, and no one else may reuse it without permission. Another 8.9% carry a license file GitHub cannot classify, such as a custom or modified license.
| Year started | No license | MIT | Apache-2.0 | Any GPL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 31.4% | 27.6% | 6.8% | 9.3% |
| 2014 | 23.6% | 34.9% | 11.0% | 9.6% |
| 2016 | 27.0% | 36.6% | 12.0% | 8.6% |
| 2018 | 27.4% | 37.1% | 12.9% | 9.4% |
| 2020 | 26.8% | 36.7% | 12.4% | 11.2% |
| 2022 | 26.1% | 35.9% | 13.3% | 12.6% |
| 2024 | 27.9% | 33.8% | 15.2% | 11.9% |
| 2025 | 24.5% | 37.7% | 15.7% | 10.4% |
| 2026 | 23.0% | 42.7% | 13.1% | 9.5% |
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No license covers 31.4% of the popular repositories started in 2012, 27.9% of those started in 2024 and 23.0% of those started in 2026, the lowest in the table. MIT covers 42.7% of 2026's, its highest.
MIT is the most common license on popular repositories, and a quarter carry none GitHub can detect.
38.5% of popular repositories have had no push in three years
| Last push | Repositories | Share of popular repositories |
|---|---|---|
| In the last 30 days | 91,851 | 19.1% |
| 30 days to a year ago | 102,355 | 21.3% |
| One to three years ago | 101,068 | 21.0% |
| More than three years ago | 185,154 | 38.5% |
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185,154 of GitHub's popular repositories, 38.5%, have had no push in three years, meaning no new commits uploaded to any branch, archived or not. 19.1% were pushed to in the last 30 days and 40.4% in the last year. Quiet, in the rest of this report, means no push in three years and never archived; archived repositories get the next section.
The most-starred repositories are the most active. Of the 5,586 with 10,000 or more stars, 5.9% have had no push in three years, archived or not, against 41.2% of those with 100 to 999 stars.
| Stars | Repositories | Pushed in the last 30 days | Pushed in the last 3 years | Quiet 3+ years | Quiet 5+ years | Quiet 7+ years | Archived |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100,000+ | 127 | 78.0% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| 50,000 to 99,999 | 369 | 75.1% | 96.5% | 0.5% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 3.0% |
| 10,000 to 49,999 | 5,090 | 56.8% | 90.4% | 4.0% | 0.8% | 0.1% | 5.6% |
| 5,000 to 9,999 | 7,022 | 44.1% | 83.4% | 9.6% | 3.3% | 1.0% | 7.1% |
| 1,000 to 4,999 | 52,298 | 30.6% | 72.2% | 19.2% | 9.1% | 4.3% | 8.6% |
| 500 to 999 | 58,476 | 22.7% | 64.2% | 27.1% | 14.4% | 7.8% | 8.7% |
| 100 to 499 | 357,046 | 15.6% | 54.8% | 36.7% | 21.8% | 13.1% | 8.5% |
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Every one of the 127 repositories with 100,000 stars or more was pushed to in the last three years, and none is archived. At 100 to 499 stars, 54.8% were pushed to in the last three years, 36.7% are quiet and 13.1% have been quiet for seven years or more.
A star count does not show whether a repository is still pushed to, and at the low end of the range more than a third are quiet.
For every archived repository, 3.9 more went quiet without being archived
| State | Repositories | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Pushed to in the last three years, not archived | 282,012 | 58.7% |
| Quiet for three years, never archived | 157,829 | 32.9% |
| Archived by its owner | 40,587 | 8.4% |
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40,587 of GitHub's popular repositories, 8.4%, have been archived by their owners, marked read-only as a sign the project has ended. 157,829 more, 32.9%, are quiet: 3.9 quiet repositories for every archived one.
The median archived repository has 236 stars, about the same as the 232 of the set as a whole, and archived repositories hold 6.7% of all stars in the set.
| Year started | Repositories | Pushed to in the last 3 years | Quiet 3+ years | Quiet 5+ years | Quiet 7+ years | Archived |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 1,065 | 31.5% | 49.6% | 40.3% | 34.3% | 18.9% |
| 2009 | 2,523 | 36.9% | 49.9% | 40.3% | 32.2% | 13.2% |
| 2010 | 4,926 | 36.9% | 48.8% | 37.5% | 29.0% | 14.2% |
| 2011 | 9,158 | 38.8% | 47.4% | 36.1% | 27.6% | 13.8% |
| 2012 | 13,966 | 36.8% | 49.0% | 37.2% | 28.3% | 14.1% |
| 2013 | 19,767 | 38.2% | 47.8% | 36.3% | 27.1% | 14.0% |
| 2014 | 24,898 | 39.0% | 47.6% | 35.7% | 26.0% | 13.4% |
| 2015 | 32,281 | 40.2% | 47.4% | 34.5% | 24.8% | 12.4% |
| 2016 | 36,160 | 39.7% | 48.8% | 34.5% | 23.9% | 11.5% |
| 2017 | 39,980 | 41.1% | 48.9% | 32.2% | 20.7% | 10.0% |
| 2018 | 39,979 | 44.8% | 45.8% | 27.3% | 14.5% | 9.4% |
| 2019 | 39,928 | 51.2% | 40.5% | 20.2% | 8.3% | |
| 2020 | 41,269 | 57.4% | 34.9% | 14.1% | 7.6% | |
| 2021 | 33,746 | 63.9% | 29.2% | 6.9% | ||
| 2022 | 30,481 | 72.4% | 21.6% | 6.0% | ||
| 2023 | 32,184 | 84.5% | 5.2% |
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48.3% of the popular repositories started from 2008 to 2017 are quiet, against 12.3% archived. The archived share is higher the older the repository, 14.2% of those started in 2010 against 0.8% of this year's, while the quiet share is about the same for every year from 2008 to 2017.
Organisation accounts have archived 13.0% of their popular repositories, twice the 6.2% of personal accounts.
7.2% of the popular AI repositories started in 2023 are archived, 269 of 3,752, against 5.0% of everything else started that year.
| Rank | Repository | Stars | Language | Started | Last push |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 |  DopplerHQ/awesome-interview-questions | 84,659 | 2015 | 2024 | |
| #2 |  sdmg15/Best-websites-a-programmer-should-visit | 76,248 | 2017 | 2025 | |
| #3 |  base/node | 68,366 | Shell | 2023 | 2026 |
| #4 |  localstack/localstack | 65,126 | Python | 2016 | 2026 |
| #5 |  gsd-build/get-shit-done | 64,465 | JavaScript | 2025 | 2026 |
| #6 |  minio/minio | 61,353 | Go | 2015 | 2026 |
| #7 |  atom/atom | 60,730 | JavaScript | 2012 | 2023 |
| #8 |  angular/angular.js | 58,505 | JavaScript | 2010 | 2024 |
| #9 |  FlowiseAI/Flowise | 55,475 | TypeScript | 2023 | 2026 |
| #10 |  AntonOsika/gpt-engineer | 55,083 | Python | 2023 | 2025 |
| #11 |  maybe-finance/maybe | 54,267 | Ruby | 2024 | 2025 |
| #12 |  GitSquared/edex-ui | 45,057 | JavaScript | 2017 | 2021 |
| #13 |  dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible | 41,713 | Shell | 2018 | 2023 |
| #14 |  google-research/bert | 40,043 | Python | 2018 | 2024 |
| #15 |  siddharthvaddem/openscreen | 39,966 | TypeScript | 2025 | 2026 |
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The most-starred archived repository is DopplerHQ/awesome-interview-questions with 84,659 stars. The list includes GitHub's own Atom editor and AngularJS, and AI projects started in 2023 such as gpt-engineer and Flowise.
Most popular repositories with no push in three years were never archived, so for them the date of the last push is the only signal a visitor has.
89.6% of popular repositories started in 2026 default to main
| Year started | Share defaulting to main |
|---|---|
| 2014 | 9.0% |
| 2015 | 9.4% |
| 2016 | 9.7% |
| 2017 | 10.0% |
| 2018 | 10.9% |
| 2019 | 12.9% |
| 2020 | 25.8% |
| 2021 | 67.6% |
| 2022 | 73.9% |
| 2023 | 79.4% |
| 2024 | 83.5% |
| 2025 | 86.6% |
| 2026 | 89.6% |
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89.6% of the popular repositories started in 2026 use main as their default branch, the branch a visitor sees first, against 12.9% of those started in 2019. The share more than doubles from 2020 to 2021, after GitHub made main the default for new repositories in October 2020.
Across every popular repository, master still leads with 59.0% against 36.6% for main, and repositories started before 2020 mostly use master.
Popular repositories started since the change mostly use main, and those started before it mostly use master.
A third of popular forks have more stars than the repository they forked
| Forks with 100+ stars | Forks | Share of forks with 100+ stars |
|---|---|---|
| More stars than the original | 3,478 | 34.7% |
| of which ten times its stars or more | 1,134 | 11.3% |
| Forked from a repository since archived | 1,261 | 12.6% |
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10,015 forks, copies of another repository, have 100 or more stars of their own, and 3,478 of them, 34.7%, have more stars than the repository they were forked from. 1,134 have at least ten times as many.
1,261 forks with 100 or more stars, 12.6%, were forked from a repository whose owner has since archived it, and 477 of those have overtaken it.
A fork can outgrow its original, and a third of the forks with 100 or more stars have. A hundred stars marks a small, top-heavy part of GitHub, and its newest repositories lean further toward TypeScript, AI topics and individual developers than any earlier year's.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most popular programming language on GitHub? Python is the primary language of 19.8% of the 480,428 public repositories with 100 or more stars, ahead of JavaScript at 11.8% and TypeScript at 7.6%. Among repositories started in 2026, TypeScript has closed much of the gap at 18.6% against Python's 29.3%.
What is the most-starred repository on GitHub? codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x, with 549,285 stars as of September 2026. sindresorhus/awesome is second with 509,836 and public-apis/public-apis third with 482,820.
Which company has the most repositories on GitHub? Microsoft's organisation account owns 1,905 popular repositories, more than any other account, and Google's owns 1,043. Both companies publish under several more accounts as well, such as Azure and dotnet for Microsoft and tensorflow and flutter for Google.
How many GitHub repositories have 10, 100 or 1,000 stars? 2.9 million public repositories have 10 or more stars, 480,428 have 100 or more and 64,906 have 1,000 or more, forks excluded. Another 10,015 forks have 100 or more stars of their own.
What license do most GitHub projects use? MIT, on 35.8% of popular repositories, followed by Apache 2.0 on 12.4%. 26.8% have no license GitHub can detect.
How many GitHub repositories carry an AI topic? 23.6% of the popular repositories started in 2026 carry an AI topic, 6,046 of them, up from 1.9% of those started in 2016. Half of popular repositories set no topics, so the real share is higher.
Do GitHub repositories use main or master? 89.6% of the popular repositories started in 2026 default to main. Across all popular repositories master still leads at 59.0%, and repositories started before 2020 mostly use it.
How many GitHub repositories are abandoned? For every popular repository its owner has archived, 3.9 more are quiet, with no push in three years and never archived: 157,829 against 40,587. Among repositories with 10,000 or more stars, only 5.9% have gone three years without a push.
Methodology and sources
What popular means. A popular repository, throughout this report, is a public GitHub repository with 100 or more stars that is not a fork. 480,428 repositories cleared that bar on 24 September 2026, and every figure is a share of them. GitHub hosts 630 million repositories, 395 million of them public, by the count in its Octoverse 2025 report, and most have no stars at all, so nothing here describes GitHub as a whole: it describes the part developers have chosen to star. The 10,015 forks with 100 or more stars are counted separately and appear only in the forks section.
How the list was collected. Every repository was read from GitHub's own API.
Stars. Star counts are as read on 24 September 2026; a few repositories just under 100 stars are included. A star is a bookmark, not a measure of use, and stars can be bought; nothing here tries to detect or remove paid stars, so the tables report what GitHub reports.
Language, license and topics. The language is the one GitHub's Linguist library detects as the repository's primary language, by bytes of code. It is the language a repository is written in today, so a project started in 2008 and later rewritten in TypeScript counts as TypeScript in its start year. The license is the one GitHub detects from the repository's license file; "a license file GitHub cannot classify" is GitHub's NOASSERTION value, and "no license" means no license file was found. Topics are the labels each owner sets, and 50.2% of popular repositories set at least one.
What counts as AI. A repository counts as AI when it carries any of these topics: ai, llm, llms, agent, agents, ai-agent, ai-agents, agentic-ai, mcp, mcp-server, chatgpt, openai, claude, claude-code, gpt, rag, generative-ai, deep-learning, machine-learning, langchain, ollama, gemini, deepseek, vibe-coding or stable-diffusion. A repository about AI that sets none of them is not counted, so the AI figures are a floor.
Star thresholds. The repositories below 100 stars were not collected, so the counts at 10 and 50 stars, the number with at least one star and the overall total are the totals GitHub search reported on 26 September 2026, forks excluded. GitHub flags that total as incomplete. Every figure from 100 stars up is the collected set.
Years. A repository counts in the year it was created. Older years have had longer for their repositories to reach 100 stars, so a year's count keeps rising after it ends and 2026's, which covers only part of the year, is a floor.
Activity. The last push is the most recent push to any branch, measured from the collection day, and includes pushes made by bots. Archived is the read-only state an owner can set on a repository; the data carries no date for when a repository was archived.
Owners. Whether an account is a person or an organisation is GitHub's own classification, and an organisation's name in the tables is the one it gives itself on GitHub.
Forks and logos. A fork is compared with the repository it was forked from directly, with both star counts read on the same day. Language logos come from Devicon under the MIT license and remain their owners' trademarks; organisation and repository icons are each owner's GitHub avatar.