PHP 8.1 reached its End-of-Life

Published On31 Dec 2025

PHP 8.1 End-of-life

PHP 8.1, which brought support for Enums, readonly properties, and more features, fixes, and deprecations reached its End-of-life today.

Released in back in 2021 November by PHP 8.1 release managers Joe Watkins, Ben Ramsey, and Patrick Allaert released a total of 35 bug fix and security fix releases in total in a span of four years. PHP 8.1 is the oldest PHP version that was included in the recent release cycle changes.

PHP 8.2, the successor of PHP 8.1, will continue to receive security fixes until 2026 Dec 31, after which it reaches its End-of-life.

PHP applications that run on PHP 8.1 or older are highly recommended to upgrade to PHP 8.2 or later. PHP 8.1 will not receive any further security (or bug) fixes from from the PHP team anymore.

Note that Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and other Linux distros and vendors might continue to provide security updates. For example, Ubuntu 22.04 includes PHP 8.1 in its repositories, and Ubuntu 22.04 reaches its End-of-Life on 2027 June. That means the Ubuntu team, may backport security fixes and release security fixes.

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