diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index bac904970dd..c9c430875db 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -119,7 +119,7 @@ extras["dev"] = extras["all"] + extras["testing"] + extras["quality"] + extras["
 
 setup(
     name="transformers",
-    version="4.0.0-dev",
+    version="4.0.0-rc-1",
     author="Thomas Wolf, Lysandre Debut, Victor Sanh, Julien Chaumond, Sam Shleifer, Patrick von Platen, Sylvain Gugger, Google AI Language Team Authors, Open AI team Authors, Facebook AI Authors, Carnegie Mellon University Authors",
     author_email="thomas@huggingface.co",
     description="State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing for TensorFlow 2.0 and PyTorch",
diff --git a/src/transformers/__init__.py b/src/transformers/__init__.py
index 91b5f15c5ff..a92fb488125 100755
--- a/src/transformers/__init__.py
+++ b/src/transformers/__init__.py
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 # There's no way to ignore "F401 '...' imported but unused" warnings in this
 # module, but to preserve other warnings. So, don't check this module at all.
 
-__version__ = "4.0.0-dev"
+__version__ = "4.0.0-rc-1"
 
 # Work around to update TensorFlow's absl.logging threshold which alters the
 # default Python logging output behavior when present.