A change can be ready for days while a team waits for a reviewer, resolves feedback or schedules the final merge. Those are different problems, even when they produce the same long delivery time.
GitHub’s September 25, 2026 update adds review-stage timings to its repository-level Copilot usage reports. The new breakdown is useful context for a conversation about how work moves through a team.
Three stages, two useful views
The reports separate ready-for-review to first review, first to final review, and final review to merge. Each stage includes a median and a 90th percentile, which helps show the difference between typical waits and the slower end of the distribution.
These fields are available in enterprise and organization repos-1-day reports. Access requires the appropriate metrics permission and the Copilot usage metrics policy to be enabled.
Sources and release notes: [1]
Understand which changes are counted
This release times human reviews of qualifying human-authored pull requests. Bot reviews and the author’s own reviews are excluded from the timing. Historical data is not backfilled; pull requests ready for review before September 21 are excluded from this section.
A day without qualifying merges has an empty array. That should not be reported as a measured zero-minute review time.
Sources and release notes: [1]
Use the data to improve the process
Our recommendation is to discuss one slow stage with the team. Waiting for a first review might call for clearer ownership. Repeated review cycles might point to oversized changes or unclear requirements. A long wait after approval may need a release-process adjustment.
Avoid ranking individual engineers with these numbers. Pair them with the type of work, reviewer availability and the team’s quality checks. The update describes elapsed review time; it does not establish that AI caused a productivity improvement.
Sources and release notes
Original analysis by AtmosGate, based on the sources below. Vendor claims and release status are attributed to their publishers.
- Usage metrics API adds pull request review stages
GitHub · 25 September 2026