Why Your PR Reviews Are Taking 4+ Hours (And How to Fix It)
PublishedWorkflow1,117 words8 min readMay 20, 2026
PR reviews taking too long? Discover the real reasons your pull requests sit idle for hours and practical fixes your engineering team can implement today.
Why Your PR Reviews Are Taking 4+ Hours (And How to Fix It)
You open a pull request on Monday morning. It is clean, well-tested, and ready to ship. By Wednesday afternoon, it is still sitting there, waiting. Sound familiar?
If your team's PR reviews are regularly taking 4, 6, or even 24+ hours, you are not dealing with a people problem. You are dealing with a systems problem. And the good news is, systems can be fixed.
In this post, we will break down exactly why PR reviews drag on longer than they should, what the data says, and most importantly, what you can actually do about it.
The Real Cost of Slow PR Reviews
When a PR sits idle for hours, the developer who opened it does not just wait patiently. They context-switch to another task. Now they are carrying mental overhead for two pieces of work. Research shows that adding just one extra project to a developer's plate consumes 20% of their productive time through context switching alone. Add a third task, and nearly half their time evaporates.
There is also the freshness problem. When a reviewer finally picks up a PR 6 hours later, they are reviewing code that the author has mentally moved on from. The author has to reload all that context. The reviewer has no background on the decision-making that went into the implementation.
According to data from LinearB's 2026 Software Engineering Benchmarks Report, which analysed over 8 million pull requests, the median engineering team has a 3.8-day lead time. Elite teams achieve sub-48-hour cycle times. The difference is not talent. It is a process.
Reason 1: PRs Are Too Large
This is the single biggest culprit, and most teams underestimate how much it matters.
When a developer opens a PR with 800 lines of changes across 12 files, reviewers do not know where to start. They skim instead of reading. They approve to unblock progress rather than to confirm quality. Google's engineering research has found that review quality drops significantly once a PR exceeds 200 lines of changed code.
The fix: Set a team norm around PR size. Many high-performing teams aim for under 200 lines per PR, with an ideal of around 50-100 lines. Break features into smaller, independently reviewable chunks.
Reason 2: No Clear Reviewer Assignment
When PRs do not have a clearly assigned reviewer, they fall into a diffusion-of-responsibility trap. Everyone assumes someone else is handling it. Hours pass. Nobody reviews it.
The fix: Always assign a specific reviewer when opening a PR. Better yet, use tools that automatically assign reviewers based on code ownership or team rotation. GitHub's CODEOWNERS file lets you define who owns what parts of the codebase and automatically requests their review.
Reason 3: Reviewers Are Overloaded
Your reviewers are also developers. They have their own feature work, their own deadlines, their own bugs to fix. Reviews land on their plate as interruptions, and interruptions are the enemy of deep work.
According to 2026 engineering productivity data, code review latency accounts for about 8 hours of wasted developer time per engineer per month.
The fix: Distribute review responsibilities more evenly. Establish a review rotation so that more team members share the load. Set an explicit SLA; for example, all PRs should receive a first review within 4 hours during working hours.
Reason 4: PRs Lack Context
A pull request with a title like "fix stuff" and no description is a nightmare to review. The reviewer has to reverse-engineer the intent from the code itself. Without context, reviewers ask more questions, and the review cycle stretches across multiple days.
The fix: Make a good PR description non-negotiable. Every PR should explain what problem it solves, what approach was taken and why, how to test it, and any known limitations. Many teams use a PR template to ensure this information is always provided.
Reason 5: No Dedicated Review Time
Most engineering teams treat code reviews as something you do when you have a moment. That moment often does not come until end of day, or end of sprint, or not at all.
The fix: Designate specific times for code review. Many teams block 9-9:30 AM and 3-3:30 PM as review windows. This normalizes review as a first-class activity rather than an afterthought.
Reason 6: The Review Feedback Loop Is Broken
Sometimes reviews take long, not because of the initial wait, but because of the back-and-forth after feedback is given. Each cycle adds hours or days to the overall review time.
The fix: Agree as a team on what "ready for re-review" communication looks like. When an author addresses feedback, they should explicitly notify the reviewer. Also consider using a "resolve conversation" workflow so both parties can clearly see what has been addressed and what is still open.
Reason 7: CI/CD Is Slow or Unstable
If your CI pipeline takes 45 minutes to run and frequently flakes, reviews get blocked waiting for green lights. By the time the PR is actually reviewable, an hour has already been burned.
The fix: Invest in CI speed and reliability. Flaky tests should be quarantined and fixed aggressively. Parallelising test runs, caching dependencies, and running the most critical tests first can dramatically reduce CI time.
What Elite Teams Do Differently
High-performing engineering teams share a few common habits around PR reviews:
Small, focused PRs - changes stay under 200 lines whenever possible
Fast pickup times - PRs get a first look within 2-4 hours
Clear ownership - every PR has an assigned reviewer from the moment it is opened
Good PR descriptions - context is provided upfront, so reviewers do not have to hunt for it
Visibility - teams can see which PRs are waiting and for how long, so nothing gets buried
The last point is often underinvested. When PR status is invisible, things fall through the cracks. When it is visible — on a board, in a daily digest, in a shared dashboard — the team self-corrects naturally.
The Bottom Line
Slow PR reviews are not inevitable. They are symptoms of specific, fixable problems: PRs that are too large, reviewers who are too few, missing context, and workflows that treat reviews as an afterthought.
Start with the highest-leverage fix for your team. Each improvement compounds. Teams that take PR review time seriously consistently ship faster, with fewer bugs, and with less developer frustration.
Want to see all your team's PR review times in one place? PRBoard gives engineering teams full visibility into their PR pipeline, who is waiting, what is blocked, and where the bottlenecks are. Try it free
