How long until someone answers your pull request?
Some answer within the hour. At others, most strangers wait weeks. Here is how to tell which is which before you start.
You fix a bug in a library you use, open a pull request, and wait.
I wanted to know how long that wait really is, so I followed 1.4 million pull requests to 11,000 GitHub projects. It depends on the project far more than I expected. Some reply before your coffee cools. At others, most strangers are still waiting two weeks later.
Some answer within hours
At Ebiten, a 2D game engine for Go, the median outside pull request gets a first human reply in about half an hour. Nomad, HashiCorp's workload scheduler, is just as quick.
cargo, Servo, k3s, Stockfish, Click and React Hook Form all have a median first reply under three hours. At each of these eight, fewer than 1 in 20 outside pull requests waited two weeks with no reply.
More than half reply within a day
Most projects are slower, though not by as much as I feared. At 2,300 projects there were enough replies to time, and at more than half of them the median first reply comes within a day. One in ten takes longer than a week.
So if a week has passed with no reply, you are waiting longer than the median at 9 in 10 of these projects. At that point I'd leave one short, polite comment asking whether anything is needed from you.
Some leave most strangers waiting
Porchlamp calls a project a black hole when it is clear that most outside pull requests get no human reply, review, merge or close within two weeks. 4,168 projects had enough outside pull requests to judge, and more than 1 in 8 of them are black holes.
Fame is no guarantee: 12 of the 100 most-starred projects are black holes.
Stars tell you how popular a project is. They don't tell you whether anyone will read your pull request.
How to check a project before you start
- Open the project's pull requests and search for closed ones:
is:pr is:closed. - Open five recent ones from people outside the project. Skip any whose author is labelled Member, Owner or Collaborator: those are insiders.
- Note how long the first human reply took. Ignore bots.
If those five waited weeks, yours may too. Or look the project up on Porchlamp, which shows the median first reply for 2,300 projects.
How I counted
I followed 1,442,863 pull requests from 227,260 outside contributors to 11,000 GitHub projects, from 25 April to 22 October 2026. Bots, drafts, pull requests their authors closed, brand-new accounts and each project's own members are not counted. A project is judged when it is licensed, maintained software with at least 10 counted outside pull requests; 4,168 were. A black hole is a judged project where, with 95% confidence, more than half of those pull requests got no human reply, review, merge or close within 14 days. 3,027 projects are ranked, and 2,300 of them have enough timed replies for a median. For projects with more than 2,000 pull requests, replies are read on an even random sample of 1,000. I picked the eight named projects from the fast group; each had at least 100 timed outside pull requests. The data can't say why a project is slow, and it covers GitHub only.
Full method and open data, free to reuse with credit: the snapshot report.
What's the longest you've waited for a first reply on a pull request?
About the author
- The model you need rarely fits where it has to run, and the number you are shown is rarely the one that decides. I work on both: vision and sensing on phones, large models on one GPU, and automated trading after costs and tax.
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