25% of code ships on weekends. 17% of reviewed PRs merge Saturday/Sunday. What your git history reveals about burnout.
Weekend Work
Code pushed Sat + Sun
Based on 802,979 merged PRs | GitHub Archive / BigQuery | October 2025
We analyzed over 800,000 merged pull requests to understand when engineers are actually pushing code. The results reveal a pattern that should concern any engineering leader thinking about team sustainability.
Weekend Pushes
1 in 4 code pushes
Sunday Commits
The "prep for Monday" day
Saturday Commits
The "catch up" day
"25% of code ships on weekends. If that's sustainable, great. If it's not, you're burning out your best engineers."
Here's where it gets interesting. When we look at PRs that actually went through code review (team-based workflows), weekend work drops significantly:
Weekend merges (includes solo projects, hobby repos)
Weekend merges (team workflows)
4.3 percentage points less
Teams with review processes work fewer weekends
Weekend commits aren't inherently bad. Open source maintainers, passionate side projects, and global teams all have legitimate reasons for weekend work. But when 1 in 4 code pushes happens on a weekend, something systemic is happening.
The difference between "reviewed PRs" (17%) and "all PRs" (25%) tells a story: teams with healthy review cultures work fewer weekends. Code review requires synchronous collaboration, which naturally discourages weekend work.
"Sunday has more commits than Saturday. That's not passion—that's engineers dreading Monday."
Your git history is a diagnostic tool. Here's what to look for:
Track your team's weekend commit rate over time. If it's increasing, deadlines are too aggressive or staffing is too lean.
Is weekend work spread across the team, or are the same people always working Saturdays? The latter signals individual burnout.
When Sunday consistently exceeds Saturday (like in our data: 12.8% vs 12.6%), engineers are catching up, not exploring.
Are weekend commits polished features or last-minute hotfixes? The latter suggests a team constantly fighting fires.
Data should inform, not surveil. Use these patterns for team health, not individual monitoring.
At CodePulse, we believe velocity should never be a goal—it's a diagnostic. The same applies to weekend work. High weekend commit rates aren't a badge of dedication. They're a warning sign.
The best engineering teams ship sustainably. They don't celebrate "hustle" or reward the engineer who's always online. They ask harder questions: Why are we working weekends? What's broken in our planning? Who's burning out?
Your git history is already tracking this. The question is whether you're paying attention. Weekend patterns should trigger conversations about workload, deadlines, and staffing—not performance reviews.
This data is for team health, not individual surveillance. Never use weekend work metrics in performance reviews.
This analysis is based on 802,979 merged pull requests from GitHub Archive / BigQuery during October 2025. "Weekend" is defined as Saturday and Sunday UTC. "Reviewed PRs" are PRs that received at least one code review event (17.2% weekend rate based on 117,413 reviewed PRs). For full methodology, see the complete study.
CodePulse shows you when your team is working and helps identify sustainability risks before they become burnout.