Symfony End of Life - Dates and Lifecycle

Symfony has been part of the PHP ecosystem for two decades, and its reusable components now sit underneath much of that ecosystem too, including several pieces Laravel itself relies on. The project recently marked 20 years since its original 2005 release.

Symfony Lifecycle Explained

Symfony releases on a fixed, predictable schedule: a patch update roughly every month (bug fixes only), a minor version every six months in May and November (new features, no breaking changes), and a new major version every two years, always in November of odd years. Major versions can contain breaking changes.

The major and LTS releases in each two-year cycle aren't the same thing, and they don't ship on their own separate schedules either, Symfony develops them together and releases them on the same day. The final minor of the outgoing branch (for example, 6.4) becomes that branch's LTS release, while the new major (7.0) ships simultaneously with the same features but with deprecated code removed. This gives teams a choice: upgrade to the LTS minor first to see deprecation warnings and fix them at a comfortable pace, then move to the new major once ready, or jump straight to the major if the codebase is already clean. Standard (non-LTS) releases get 8 months of bug fixes and 8 months of security fixes. LTS releases get 3 years of bug fixes and 4 years of security fixes.

Symfony 5.4 LTS is a notable exception to its own schedule. Its security support was originally due to end in November 2025, but Ibexa, a company whose own DXP platform is built on Symfony 5.4, sponsored an extension pushing that date to February 2029. Symfony has said these extended security patches are published publicly through Packagist, so the benefit isn't limited to Ibexa's own customers, anyone still on Symfony 5.4 gets the extended coverage.

PHP Compatibility by Symfony Version

Symfony's PHP policy works differently than a fixed range. Each version has a stated minimum PHP requirement, but while that Symfony version is still maintained, it supports every PHP release that comes out afterward too, there's no upper cap. Once a Symfony version reaches end of life, its PHP support freezes at whatever the latest PHP version was on that date, running a newer PHP release against an EOL Symfony version isn't guaranteed to work.