diff --git a/bin/mkrelease b/bin/mkrelease
index f94eddda9..c8ff19329 100755
--- a/bin/mkrelease
+++ b/bin/mkrelease
@@ -166,12 +166,6 @@ DEV="$(printf %d.%d.%d.dev0 $MAJOR $MINOR $NEXT)"
 
 #cd $DIR ??
 
-note "Running the tests suite and writing release coverage data ..."
-$do ietf/manage.py test --settings=ietf.settings_releasetest --save-version-coverage=$VER
-
-note "Committing the release coverage data ..."
-$do svn commit release-coverage.json -m "Code coverage data for release $VER"
-
 # note "Checking that there's a recent test-crawler log"
 # touch -d $RDATE .svn/.latest-commit
 # TCLOG=$(ls -t ../test-crawl-*.log | head -n 1)
@@ -182,6 +176,15 @@ changes=$( sed -n "/^$PROJ ($VER.*)/,/^ -- /p" changelog )
 [ "$changes" ] || die "No changelog information for $VER found"
 note "$changes"
 
+note "Checking that we don't have any model changes that haven't been captured in migrations"
+svn makemigrations | tee /dev/stderr | grep "^No changes detected$" || die "Model changes without migrations found."
+
+note "Running the tests suite and writing release coverage data ..."
+$do ietf/manage.py test --settings=ietf.settings_releasetest --save-version-coverage=$VER
+
+note "Committing the release coverage data ..."
+$do svn commit release-coverage.json -m "Code coverage data for release $VER"
+
 contributors=$(echo "$changes" | sed 's/\.[ \t\n]/ /'| tr -c "a-z0-9.@-" "\n" | sort | uniq | grep '@' | sed -r -e 's/^\.+//' -e 's/\.+$//' -e 's/^/-c /' || true)
 
 note "Set the current time on the release notes in the changelog file"