RHEL End of Life - Dates and Lifecycle

RHEL has one of the more layered support lifecycles of any enterprise operating system, and it's worth understanding the phases before trying to answer "is RHEL X end of life," because the honest answer usually depends on which phase you mean. A version can be well past its most active support phase and still be receiving critical security patches for years afterward.

RHEL Lifecycle Explained

Each major RHEL version gets a standard 10-year lifecycle split into two phases. Full Support, roughly the first five years, includes new features, hardware enablement, and full bug and security coverage. Maintenance Support, the next five years, narrows that down to critical and important security advisories and select high-priority bug fixes only, no new functionality. Once those 10 years close, an optional paid Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) add-on can extend coverage further, typically covering only the highest-severity CVEs for the final minor release of that major version, for up to several more years beyond the standard window.

Applied to specific versions: RHEL 8 finished Full Support in May 2024 and is now in Maintenance Support through May 2029. RHEL 9 is in Full Support until May 2027, with Maintenance Support running to May 2032. RHEL 10, released in May 2025, is expected to follow the same pattern, Full Support to roughly 2030 and Maintenance Support to roughly 2035. RHEL 7 finished Maintenance Support in mid-2024, but its ELS add-on keeps critical CVE coverage available through May 31, 2029 for organizations that purchased it. RHEL 6, by contrast, has been fully out of support, including ELS, since June 30, 2024.

Because Maintenance Support still delivers real security patches, just a narrower set of them, a RHEL version in Maintenance Support isn't the urgent problem an EOL Linux distribution normally represents. The real deadline to track is the end of Maintenance Support (or ELS, if purchased), not the end of Full Support.