diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index bac904970d..c9c430875d 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 91b5f15c5f..a92fb48812 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.