Lifecycle guide for PHP from PHP

All releases, patches, maintenance and support periods at a glance

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📅 Last update on 2026-08-16

What is PHP?

Automate product release and end-of-life management

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development.

The entire lifecycle of PHP

The following figure shows you the visualised product life cycle of PHP. You can see all releases with the latest patch version, the long-term support characteristics (orange flag in the green circle, the periods for version provision, maintenance and support.

PHP (PHP) release, version and end-of-life information

Figure: Release, patch and end-of-life cycle of product PHP (PHP)

What is the PHP release strategy?

Each release branch of PHP is fully supported for two years from its initial stable release. During this period, bugs and security issues that have been reported are fixed and are released in regular point releases. After this two year period of active support, each branch is then supported for an additional year for critical security issues only. Releases during this period are made on an as-needed basis: there may be multiple point releases, or none, depending on the number of reports.

Facts and figures about PHP

Product

PHP

Vendor

PHP

Latest version

8.5.9

Number of releases

Number of versions

1348

Number of unstable versions

786

Number of versions affected by CVE

552

Licence

PHP license

Licence details

https://www.php.net/license/index.php

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP

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