GitHub pull request limits now count draft PRs too
Maintainers can cap how many open PRs a low-trust contributor can hold at once. Drafts were exempt until today, which made them an easy way around the cap.
GitHub closed a loophole in its pull request limits feature on 8 October: draft pull requests now count toward the cap, where before they didn’t.
Pull request limits let a maintainer restrict how many open PRs a contributor without write access can hold on a repository at once, with trusted contributors exempted via a bypass list. GitHub introduced the feature to deal with a surge of low-quality, often AI-generated PRs hitting open source projects: GitHub says over 90 million pull requests are merged across the platform every month, and that volume has been straining maintainers who have to triage each one by hand. Until this change, opening a submission as a draft sidestepped the limit entirely, so someone determined to flood a repository could just keep opening drafts.
Why it matters: if you maintain a repository and already have pull request limits turned on, this closes a gap you may not have known existed. If you haven’t set one up, it’s reachable from the repository’s contribution settings and worth a look if your issue tracker has started filling with unreviewed drafts.