Drupal 10 will be supported until December 2026
From Drupal 10 on, Drupal core has a new major release schedule with a long-term support phase, so that two major versions are supported at a time. We previously announced that Drupal 10 would be supported until mid- to late 2026, depending on when Drupal 12 was released.
We are updating the release schedule and have agreed that Drupal 10 will officially be supported until December 2026, regardless of whether Drupal 12 is released in June, August, or December. This fixed end-of-life date should provide more certainty for the ecosystem and make planning site upgrades easier.
Disruptive deprecations should now be scheduled for removal in Drupal 13.0.0
Drupal core uses a deprecation process to provide backwards compatibility and a continuous upgrade path between major versions. When new APIs are added, the old code is deprecated and scheduled for removal in a later major version. Under the continuous upgrade path, the new major version has the same API as the final minor version of the previous major, but with deprecated code removed.
Drupal 12 is scheduled for release in 2026, and its first possible release window is June 2026. This means that the next major version of core may have a stable version in less than a year, with its beta versions released as early as March. At the same time, the current maintenance minor version of Drupal 10 (10.5.x) will receive security coverage until June 2026.
As a result, contributed projects may add Drupal 12 support while Drupal 10.5 is still supported during early 2026, which means those core versions need to share the same important APIs. Therefore, disruptive deprecations in Drupal 11.3.x and higher should be scheduled for removal in 13.0.0 (rather than 12.0.0). This allows contributed modules to support both the next major release and the currently supported minors. This way, we will not break backwards compatibility with 10.5.x for important APIs.
Help us get ready for Drupal 12!
Core modules are actually not disruptive to deprecate, because we can create an equivalent package in contrib and provide sites a smooth upgrade path for these modules from Drupal 11 core to Drupal 12 contrib. Take a look at the list of modules and other dependencies planned for removal from Drupal 12, and consider helping move these issues forward.