Django End of Life - Dates and Lifecycle

Django ships a new feature release roughly every eight months, and every third release is designated Long Term Support (LTS). That distinction matters more here than in most frameworks, because the gap between an LTS and a standard release's support window is large: an LTS gets three years of security coverage, while a standard release gets roughly sixteen months. Picking the wrong one to build on can mean re-planning an upgrade far sooner than expected.

Django Lifecycle Explained

Every Django release goes through two support phases regardless of type. The first eight months are mainstream support, covering security fixes, data loss bugs, and regressions. After that, standard releases (the .0 and .1 versions in each cycle) drop into extended support, security and data-loss fixes only, for another eight months, then reach end of life at around the sixteen-month mark. LTS releases (the .2 version that closes out each three-release cycle) get a much longer extended support phase, 28 months instead of eight, bringing their total lifespan to three years.

This is why the Django project itself recommends anchoring production applications to LTS releases specifically rather than whatever the latest version happens to be. A standard release gives you new features sooner, but the support clock runs out roughly twice as fast, and by the project's own account, a large share of installations in the wild are running a version that's already past its supported window at any given time.