For a long time, people who were working with Laravel know that the release cycle was stable for about four years and the new version became available every six months. But at the beginning of 2021, the plans were reviewed. Taylor Otwell announced that the release schedule would change. Laravel will be updated once every year now. That should make keeping the systems up-to-date much more effortless, taking into account that this framework is very popular and many developers rely on it.
When the decision was published, the latest major version was 8.0, released in September of 2020. It meant that the upcoming updates should become available in September as well. 9.0 - in 2021 and 10.0 in 2022.
However, yesterday Taylor announced in the Laravel blog that the release schedule would be adjusted again. The new version will be released in January 2022. That happened because Laravel depends on some community-driven software, including Symfony components. The latter will be updated to version 6.0 in November 2021. So the postponed release of Laravel will allow them to upgrade their Symfony components without waiting until September 2022 and doing the same with future releases. So, for now, the upcoming Laravel versions will become available as follows:
Laravel 9.0 - January 2022
Laravel 10.0 - January 2023
Laravel 11.0 - January 2024
And currently, their team is also working on updates, fixes, and improvements for 8.x, which don’t need a major release.
