Laravel is moving to a yearly major release cycle

The Laravel team has announced that effective immediately Laravel is moving to a yearly release cycle on major versions instead of the six-month cycle it’s been on for the past few years.

From Taylor’s announcement:

For the last 4 years, Laravel has released a new “major” version every 6 months. Before adopting the “semantic versioning” standard – the second number in the Laravel version number changed every 6 months. With the adoption of semantic versioning, the first number in the Laravel version number changed every 6 months. However, the release cycle speed stayed the same throughout that transition – even though many users felt that Laravel versions were being released more frequently.

Over the same 4 years, Laravel has matured and solidified its position as the development framework of choice for most PHP developers. As the number of businesses and individuals using Laravel has grown substantially, I feel like now is a good time to update our release schedule to help ease the maintenance burden on our community.

With this change, Laravel 9 that was scheduled for March of 2021 has now been pushed to September. They will continue doing weekly patch releases but this should make things feel a lot slower.

This new release cycle will not only ease the maintenance burden on our community and relieve the stress of feeling like you are being “left behind”, it will challenge us as Laravel developers to implement high-value, amazing features without breaking backwards compatibility so that we can deliver them to you as quickly as possible.