Ubuntu End of Life - Dates and Lifecycle

Ubuntu's version numbers tell you exactly when a release shipped: the format is YY.MM, so 22.04 means April 2022. Canonical ships a new release every six months, but only the April release in even-numbered years is designated Long Term Support (LTS), and LTS is what almost all production deployments should be running. The gap between an LTS and an ordinary interim release is large enough that picking the wrong one has real consequences for how soon you'll need to upgrade again.

Ubuntu Lifecycle Explained

Interim releases, the ones that land in odd years or in October, get nine months of updates before they're retired, they're built for people who want the newest packages and are willing to upgrade twice a year. LTS releases get five years of standard support covering the core system, and Canonical also offers Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM) through an Ubuntu Pro subscription that extends coverage another five years, bringing total support to ten years. A further Legacy add-on can stretch that to fifteen years for organizations that need it. Free personal use of Ubuntu Pro's ESM tier is available on a small number of machines, which covers individual users, though enterprise deployments at scale need a paid subscription.

Because of this tiered model, "is Ubuntu X end of life" often has two different honest answers depending on whether you mean standard support or ESM. A release can be past its five-year standard support window and still be receiving security patches for years afterward under ESM, so it's worth checking which tier actually applies to your systems before assuming a version is fully unsupported.

One practical wrinkle: Ubuntu upgrades between LTS releases are sequential, not direct. You can't jump straight from 16.04 to 22.04, you have to step through 18.04 and 20.04 first, which is worth planning for well ahead of an EOL deadline rather than discovering it during a rushed migration.