I’ve spent more than 800 hours working with Claude Code.
I started in mid-2025. What I can’t tell you from my own experience is how many other people use it. And Anthropic isn’t saying.
A useful clue comes from JetBrains’ 2026 survey. In it, 39% of more than 15,000 professional developers said they use Claude Code at work.
And Claude Code has only existed since February 24, 2025, when it launched as a research preview.
In this article, I’ll show you the key Claude Code statistics on usage, revenue, pricing, and benchmarks. Here’s the short version:
- In JetBrains' 2026 survey, 39% of more than 15,000 professional developers said they use Claude Code at work.
- Anthropic reported an annualized Claude Code revenue run rate above $2.5 billion on February 12, 2026.
- The Claude Code npm package reached 562.7 million downloads through October 6, 2026.
1. What Is Claude Code?
Claude Code is Anthropic’s coding agent. It can read a project, edit files, run commands, and manage changes with Git. According to the official documentation, Anthropic offers it in the terminal, IDEs, a desktop app, and a browser.
The main public milestones show the difference between product preview and general availability:
According to Anthropic’s February 24, 2025 announcement, the preview launched alongside Claude 3.7 Sonnet. General availability followed with the May 22, 2025 Claude 4 announcement.
2. GitHub Stars and npm Downloads
The GitHub repository had 149,665 stars according to the GitHub API on October 7, 2026.
- 149,665 GitHub stars on October 7, 2026
- 562,748,153 npm downloads from February 24, 2025, to October 6, 2026
- 52,946,380 npm downloads in the 30-day period from September 7 to October 6, 2026
- Version 2.1.292, released October 6, 2026, according to the GitHub releases
The 30-day figure comes from the npm download API. According to npm, these are HTTP downloads of package archives, including build servers, mirrors, and bots.
3. User Numbers and Adoption
Anthropic has not published an absolute count of active Claude Code users. The 2026 Developer Ecosystem Survey from JetBrains offers a current comparison of reported use at work. Its tenth edition surveyed more than 15,000 professional developers worldwide. Across all AI coding agents, 90% of respondents reported using one at least weekly and 68% daily.
gradually.aiIn the JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey 2026, 31% called Claude Code their main AI coding tool in the summer wave. Reported use in the United States was 47%.
4. Usage and Popularity in Surveys
The Pragmatic Engineer survey ran from January 27 to February 17, 2026, among newsletter readers, with more than 900 respondents. A total of 507 of them, or 55%, regularly used AI agents.
4.1 Tools Used by Regular Agent Users
Among regular agent users, 71% named Claude Code, well ahead of GitHub Copilot and Cursor.
Respondents could name several tools, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
4.2 Most-Loved AI Tools
The same survey also asked which AI tools respondents love using most and why. Claude Code leads clearly here too.
5. Revenue and Business Figures
Anthropic publishes some revenue figures as run rates. The chart shows the Claude Code values. August and February are lower bounds (“more than”), and November is the announced $1 billion milestone. Bloomberg describes the metric as projecting a shorter period across a full year.
gradually.aiThe figures for Anthropic overall are in a separate table. They do not cover Claude Code alone:
For Claude Code alone, the latest separately stated run rate I found in a public company source was more than $2.5 billion on February 12, 2026. In Anthropic’s February 12 announcement, the company said it had more than doubled since the start of the year. It also said weekly active Claude Code users had doubled since January 1.
The earlier milestones were announced with the $500 million milestone on September 2 and the $1 billion milestone in November, six months after general availability.
Anthropic gave the early-May figure of more than $47 billion in its May 28 announcement. Bloomberg reported the $65 billion on August 18, citing anonymous sources. The expected $100 billion comes from a New York Times report that Axios cited on September 18.
6. Coding Benchmarks
Anthropic publishes Terminal-Bench 4.0 results for its coding models.
Provider results. The effort settings are not identical, so these figures are not a direct ranking.
Opus 5.5 was released on September 22, 2026, and Sonnet 5.5 on September 28. For Opus 5.5, Anthropic’s Opus release report specifies Xhigh effort and a 2.6 percentage point standard error.
According to the Sonnet system card, the Sonnet test used Claude Code in “--bare” mode at maximum effort, across 66 tasks and five trials per task, without internet access. The standard error is 2.5 percentage points.
7. What We Know About Successful Work and Productivity
An Anthropic study published June 16, 2026 analyzed about 400,000 interactive sessions from approximately 235,000 people between October 2025 and April 2026. It covered Claude Code in the terminal, Claude.ai, and the desktop app. The table shows shares of sessions with code changes.
A session counted as a verified success only if a classifier judged its goal to have been met and there was a verifiable signal such as a commit or passing tests. Sessions without a clear goal (about 7.7%) were excluded.
The same study assigns every session to one of nine work modes. A little over half involve writing, fixing, and testing code. Another 17% concern operating software, and a bit more than a quarter planning, understanding, analysis, and documents.
gradually.aiAnthropic’s Claude Code Analytics API gives organizations daily metrics, including accepted or rejected proposals for file-editing tools, sessions, lines changed, commits, and pull requests.
8. Pricing and Costs
Claude Code is not included in Claude’s free plan. Individual access starts with Pro. Max offers higher usage limits.
8.1 Monthly Plan Prices
The chart shows US list prices per month with monthly billing, before taxes. Team prices are per seat.
gradually.ai8.2 Plan Usage Limits and Annual Prices
Anthropic states plan usage only relative to Pro. Max 5x offers five times and Max 20x twenty times the Pro usage per 5-hour session. Anthropic does not publish absolute message or hour counts. All paid plans also have a weekly limit.
gradually.aiAccording to Anthropic’s pricing page, Pro costs $200 up front with annual billing, which works out to about $17 per month. Team and Enterprise also include Claude Code.
Team requires at least two seats. With annual billing, a Standard seat costs $20 and a Premium seat $100 per month. Premium seats offer five times the usage of Standard seats. Enterprise costs $20 per seat per month, billed annually with a minimum of 20 seats. Usage is billed on top at API rates.
8.3 API Prices per Million Tokens
API pricing depends on the model and number of input and output tokens. Anthropic lists these standard rates per million tokens for its generally available Claude models.
gradually.aiAccording to Anthropic’s API pricing documentation, prompt caching and Opus Fast mode have separate prices.
9. Technical Specifications
Anthropic lists the context windows in its model overviews for Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5. Supported surfaces and operating systems are described in the Claude Code documentation and the plan overview. The GitHub repository’s license file refers to Anthropic’s commercial terms.
If you want to try Claude Code, our Claude Code guide has a place to start. For general figures about Claude and Anthropic, see Claude Statistics 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions About Claude Code
Under US pricing, Pro costs $20 with monthly billing or $200 paid up front for a year (effectively $17 per month). Max costs $100 per month for the 5x tier or $200 per month for the 20x tier. API usage is billed separately by model and token count.
For a detailed breakdown of plan tiers and API costs, see the Claude Code pricing guide.
