No, you only shouldn't rebase if you pushed to a shared branch. If it's your PR that only you are working on and you need to update it to the latest in the master branch, rebasing is the correct way to do this. There isn't a magical rule about not pushing to a remote branch. The point is to recognize that rebasing rewrites the history which is a problem if and only if that history has already been relied on by someone else or otherwise integrated in such a way that rewriting that history is destructive. If it's your PR, then as far as anyone else is concerned, you DID just checkout the latest from master and branch off of it. No one needs to know or care that you actually rebased.