GitHub stacked pull requests are generally available on all github.com plans: approvals survive rebases, whole stacks land via merge queue, and gh stack ships an AI-agent skill
On 2026-10-06 GitHub made stacked pull requests generally available on all github.com plans, with GitHub Enterprise Server support coming in a later release. Since the public preview, repos using stacks have merged 9% more code than their peers, and more than two-thirds of the top 1% of repos now use them, with a 5% faster time-to-merge. New in GA: approvals are kept for unchanged code after a rebase, replacement commits are signed automatically, a whole stack enters the merge queue as one merge group, stacks retarget automatically when their base branch is deleted, and stack auto-merge is rolling out over the coming weeks. The gh-stack CLI extension (v0.2.0) now supports Git worktrees, and gh skill install github/gh-stack teaches AI coding agents how to split large changes into stacked PRs.
Key Takeaways
- Impact (changelog): repos using stacks merge 9% more code; over 2/3 of the top 1% of repos use them, with 5% faster time-to-merge
- Approvals and signing: Rebase stack keeps approvals on unchanged code even when stale approvals are dismissed; replacement commits are signed and keep the original authorship
- Merge queue: a stack lands as 1 merge group; with the merge-commit method, each PR gets its own merge commit; stack auto-merge rolls out over the next few weeks
- Agents: gh-stack v0.2.0 (2026-10-02, 1.6k stars) supports worktrees and installs an agent skill via
gh skill install github/gh-stack; the pull_request webhook gains astackedaction - Coverage: all github.com plans now, GHES in an upcoming release; requires gh v2.0+ and Git 2.36+
