What does axis in pandas mean?

It specifies the axis along which the means are computed. By default axis=0. This is consistent with the numpy.mean usage when axis is specified explicitly (in numpy.mean, axis==None by default, which computes the mean value over the flattened array) , in which axis=0 along the rows (namely, index in pandas), and axis=1 along the columns. For added clarity, one may choose to specify axis='index' (instead of axis=0) or axis='columns' (instead of axis=1).

+------------+---------+--------+
|            |  A      |  B     |
+------------+---------+---------
|      0     | 0.626386| 1.52325|----axis=1----->
+------------+---------+--------+
             |         |
             | axis=0  |
             ↓         ↓