When you look up a developer on commit-history.com, some profiles show a Private contributions stat next to their public commits — often dwarfing them — while other profiles show nothing at all. That difference isn't about how much someone codes. It's about a single GitHub profile setting.

What GitHub counts as a private contribution

GitHub exposes one opaque number per time window: restrictedContributionsCount. It is the sum of all contribution types — commits, issues, pull requests, and reviews — made in private repositories the viewer can't see into.

Unlike public activity, GitHub never breaks this number down. There is no way to tell, from the outside, whether 10,000 private contributions are commits to one company monorepo or code reviews across fifty client projects. That's deliberate: the count proves activity without leaking anything about where it happened.

Why many developers show zero

Private contributions are opt-in. GitHub only reports the count if the user has enabled it themselves:

Settings → Public profile → Contributions & Activity → ✅ Include private contributions on my profile

If that box is unchecked (the default), GitHub's API reports 0 — to us and to everyone else. So a profile showing no private contributions usually means the developer simply hasn't flipped the switch, not that they do all their work in public.

This is the most common question we get: "I commit to private repos all day, why does my chart show nothing?" Enable the setting on GitHub, then revisit your commit-history page — the next refresh picks it up.

How commit-history.com tracks it

We fetch each user's contribution calendar month by month over their entire GitHub lifetime, storing public commits and private contributions as separate series. On your page:

The Private contributions stat and chart metric only appear when the count is greater than zero — profiles that haven't opted in just don't show the row.
The Total metric adds public commits and private contributions together, which is often the fairest picture for developers who work mostly in private company repositories.
Your public rank on the leaderboard uses public commits only, since private counts aren't comparable across users (one person's "contribution" may be a review, another's a commit).

Things to keep in mind when reading the number

It's not just commits. A developer doing heavy code review in private repos accrues private contributions without pushing a single commit. Comparing someone's private contributions against another person's public commits is apples to oranges.

History appears retroactively. When someone enables the setting, GitHub exposes their whole private history at once — so a chart can suddenly gain years of activity overnight. That jump is the setting changing, not a 10x-engineer awakening.

It can disappear again. Turning the setting off zeroes the reported count. If a profile you compared against last month now shows no private activity, that's usually why.

See it in action

Look up any user on commit-history.com and switch the metric to Private or Total — or compare two developers to see how public and private activity differ across careers.