---
id: fastavro
version: "1.12.2"
license: MIT
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# fastavro — Fast read/write of AVRO files

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Popularity: top 1,000 on PyPI

## Install

pip install fastavro
uv add fastavro
poetry add fastavro

## Description

# fastavro
[![Build Status](https://github.com/fastavro/fastavro/workflows/Build/badge.svg)](https://github.com/fastavro/fastavro/actions)
[![Documentation Status](https://readthedocs.org/projects/fastavro/badge/?version=latest)](http://fastavro.readthedocs.io/en/latest/?badge=latest)
[![codecov](https://codecov.io/gh/fastavro/fastavro/branch/master/graph/badge.svg)](https://codecov.io/gh/fastavro/fastavro)


Because the Apache Python `avro` package is written in pure Python, it is
relatively slow. In one test case, it takes about 14 seconds to iterate through
a file of 10,000 records. By comparison, the JAVA `avro` SDK reads the same file in
1.9 seconds.

The `fastavro` library was written to offer performance comparable to the Java
library. With regular CPython, `fastavro` uses C extensions which allow it to
iterate the same 10,000 record file in 1.7 seconds. With PyPy, this drops to 1.5
seconds (to be fair, the JAVA benchmark is doing some extra JSON
encoding/decoding).

`fastavro` supports the following Python versions:

* Python 3.9
* Python 3.10
* Python 3.11
* Python 3.12
* Python 3.13
* Python 3.14
* PyPy3

## Supported Features

* File Writer
* File Reader (iterating...

## AI interpretation — verify before relying

fastavro provides fast serialization and deserialization of Apache Avro data files, with C extensions delivering performance comparable to the Java SDK while supporting schemaless I/O, multiple codecs, and schema resolution.

Verdict: fastavro is a production-stable, actively maintained library in the top 1000 PyPI packages with no known vulnerabilities. Its permissive MIT license and comprehensive codec/schema support make it suitable for performance-critical Avro workloads, though medium install friction from compiled extensions is typical for this use case.

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