Active Contributors Report

Last updated: October 27, 2026

Active Contributors counts the distinct people marked Contributor who committed code or had a pull request (PR) merged in the 30 days before any day in your date range. It shows how many engineers are actually shipping code.

Why it matters

  • Team capacity: track how many people actively contribute code, and whether that number is growing, shrinking, or stable.

  • Context for rates: it describes the population behind per-person metrics such as PRs merged / week.

  • Engagement and allocation: compare active developer counts across teams, and spot people who have stopped contributing code.

How it works

A person counts as an active contributor when all of these hold:

  1. They're marked Contributor under Code Contribution in Settings > People management.

  2. The day falls between their start date and termination date.

  3. On at least one day in the range, they had a commit or a merged PR in the 30 days up to that day.

Span counts each qualifying person once for the range. A single commit or merged PR is enough. Activity is dated in your organization's time zone.

What counts: commits and merged PRs, including activity in repositories you've ignored for other metrics.

What doesn't count: PR reviews and comments on their own, issue activity, and dev agents. Out-of-office time doesn't remove anyone: a person on a two-week vacation still counts.

Where to find it: go to Settings > People management and click View contributors to open the Active Contributors report. Person and team breakdowns show whether each person is active. You can break it down by team, job level, job title, job family, location, and tenure, by day, week, month, or quarter.

Setup

  1. Connect your version control system.

  2. In Settings > People management, set Code Contribution to Non-contributor for people who don't write code, such as most managers. Span recommends this. New members you add by hand start as Contributor; people synced from your directory start as Contributor when they have a version control username mapped.

  3. Make sure start and termination dates are correct, from your HRIS or entered by hand. They bound the days a person can count.

Things to know

  • Worked example. Your team has 12 engineers and 2 managers in Span. The managers are marked Non-contributor. One engineer joined last week and hasn't committed yet, and another moved to a design role and last committed 45 days ago. For a one-week range, Active Contributors is 10.

  • The 30-day tail. Someone who stops coding stays active for 30 days after their last commit or merged PR, then drops out until they commit again. Someone on long leave drops out once their last activity is more than 30 days old.

  • It differs from the per-week denominator. PR and commit rates such as PRs merged / week also treat reviews and PR comments as activity and leave out out-of-office days. A reviewer who never commits stays in those denominators but isn't counted in Active Contributors.

  • Non-contributor applies to all history. Switching someone to Non-contributor removes them from past periods too.

  • Why it's lower than your HR headcount: HR counts everyone employed, including managers, new hires who haven't committed, and people on extended leave.

  • Why it differs from seat counts: GitHub or AI tool seat counts include anyone with a license, active or not.

Related articles

What determines contributor status in Span user profiles?

How to read Span's "/ week" metrics

PRs Merged / Week

Need help?

Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.