Tidying up after Pull Requests
At GitHub, we love to use Pull Requests all day, every day. The only trouble is that we end up with a lot of defunct branches after Pull Requests have…
At GitHub, we love to use Pull Requests all day, every day. The only trouble is that we end up with a lot of defunct branches after Pull Requests have been merged or closed. From time to time, one of us would clear out these branches with a script, but we thought it would be better to take care of this step as part of our regular workflow on GitHub.com.
Starting today, after a Pull Request has been merged, you’ll see a button to delete the lingering branch:

If the Pull Request was closed without being merged, the button will look a little different to warn you about deleting unmerged commits:

Of course, you can only delete branches in repositories that you have push access to.
Enjoy your tidy repositories!
Written by
Related posts
GitHub availability report: May 2026
In May, we experienced nine incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.
GitHub Universe is back: All together now, in the agentic era
GitHub Universe is back: returning to the historic Fort Mason Center in San Francisco on October 28–29, 2026.
GitHub Copilot app: The agent-native desktop experience
At Microsoft Build 2026, GitHub introduced new tools, updates, and surfaces so agents can work the way you already work.