StarHunt research | August 2026

State of Developer Reachability 2026

Hiring teams assume developers are hard to reach. Measured across 95,000+ active GitHub profiles, 32% publish an email address anyone can use. The difficulty is not access, it is knowing who to contact.

Based on 95,000+ public GitHub developer profiles | Updated August 2026 | Free to cite with a link to this page

32%
List a public email
16%
Signal they are open to work
56%
Pushed code in the last 90 days
30%
Contribute to a reference project

Key findings

Reachability is not evenly spread. China leads at 57%, against 39% for Canada, a 18 point gap for the same measure. Sourcing difficulty is partly a geography problem, not only a skills problem.
Reachable is not the same as interested. 32% can be contacted, but only 16% signal they are open to work. The gap between the two is where most outreach fails: the audience is available, not waiting.

Reachability by country

Share of developers listing a public email address, for countries with a large enough sample to publish. Ranked from most to least reachable.

China57%
South Korea52%
Sweden46%
India45%
Brazil45%
Netherlands42%
Poland42%
Italy41%
United States40%
Spain39%
Australia39%
Canada39%

Reachability by technology

The same measure, grouped by the technologies developers actually work with rather than by what they claim on a profile.

GraphQL44%
Vue.js44%
Scala42%
TensorFlow41%
Ruby41%
React40%
Kubernetes39%
Swift38%
Angular38%
Rust37%
PyTorch37%
Go37%

Where reachable developers are concentrated

Cities with a large enough sample, ranked by the share of developers who can be contacted directly.

Beijing60%
Shanghai58%
Seoul52%
São Paulo49%
Melbourne48%
Phoenix48%
Portland46%
Raleigh45%
Amsterdam45%
San Diego44%
Bangalore43%
Cologne43%

Who signals they are open to work

The 'available for hire' flag is a much stronger signal than reachability, and a much rarer one. Ranked by the share of each group that has turned it on.

China15%
South Korea16%
Sweden19%
India29%
Brazil27%
Netherlands21%
Poland24%
Italy20%
United States22%
Spain15%
Australia23%
Canada25%

By role

Roles inferred from public work rather than job titles.

Data engineering41%
Data science40%
AI product engineering36%
Infrastructure, DevOps and SRE36%
AI research36%
Software engineering35%

What share of developers on GitHub can be contacted directly?

32% of the active developers in this study list a public email address on their GitHub profile, which means they can be contacted without an introduction or a paid tool.

How many developers signal they are open to work?

16% have enabled the 'available for hire' flag on their GitHub profile. That group is far smaller than the reachable one, but it is the warmest audience for outreach.

How was this measured?

Aggregated from 95,000+ public GitHub profiles indexed by StarHunt as of August 2026. Only public profile fields and public contribution activity were used. No private data, no scraping of gated sources.

Methodology

Every figure comes from public GitHub profile fields and public contribution activity, aggregated across the StarHunt index as of August 2026. A country, technology, city or role appears only when its sample is large enough for a percentage to be meaningful, which is why some familiar names are absent. No private data is used, and no gated source is scraped.

This report may be quoted and republished freely, with attribution and a link to this page.

Country breakdowns

This report is the worldwide view. The same reachability figures are published country by country, refreshed weekly, alongside city rankings and technology breakdowns.

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