Drupal 10 end of life: 9 December, and no skipping to 12

Drupal 10 end of life is 9 December 2026, but the last scheduled security window before that date is 18 November, and Drupal 12 ships the same December week on PHP 8.5 only. You cannot jump from 10 straight to 12. By the end of this post you will know which Drupal 11 minor and PHP version to target this month, and when the deadline is better used to replatform.

Here are the dates that matter, as of 2 November 2026, taken from Drupal.org's core release schedule (last updated 28 October 2026) and php.net's supported versions page.

Date	What happens	Who it affects
Week of 29 June 2026	Drupal 11.4.0 released; security support ended for 10.5.x and 11.2.x	Anyone not yet on 10.6.x
18 November 2026	Third Wednesday of the month, the usual security release window	The last scheduled window before Drupal 10 end of life
Week of 7 December 2026	Drupal 12.0.0 and 11.5.0 released; security support ends for 10.6.x and 11.3.x	Every Drupal 10 site, and sites parked on 11.3
9 December 2026	Drupal 10 end of life; no new Drupal 10 releases after this date	Every Drupal 10 site
31 December 2026	PHP 8.2 security support ends	Drupal 10 sites still on PHP 8.2

The Drupal 10 end of life date is 9 December, but the cover stops earlier

Drupal.org gives the deadline two ways on the same page. The prose says "Drupal 10 will reach end of life on December 9, 2026", while the timeline lists "End of security support for 11.3.x and 10.6.x" in the week of 7 December. Both are true: 9 December is the Wednesday of that week. Acquia and Pantheon both repeat the 9 December date.

The date that matters more for planning is when fixes actually ship. The schedule says security windows "will usually be on the third Wednesday of the month". That puts November's window on 18 November and December's on 16 December, a week after Drupal 10 has gone. If a security advisory lands for core after 18 November, there is no scheduled slot left to deliver a Drupal 10 fix in.

Drupal 10.6.0 is the last minor release of Drupal 10, and 10.6.x is the only Drupal 10 branch still in the security window. After end of life, Acquia states there will be "no security updates, new features, bug fixes, or documentation updates for Drupal 10 from the Drupal community." Paid cover is not a plan either: Pantheon notes that "No Drupal 10 program has been announced yet".

You can't upgrade from Drupal 10 straight to Drupal 12

A Drupal 10 to Drupal 12 upgrade in one step is not supported. The Upgrade Status module page is explicit: jumping multiple major versions "is not supported by Upgrade Status, nor the Drupal core upgrade path", and "it is not possible to directly upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 11/12 or Drupal 10 to 12."

So "wait for Drupal 12" is not an alternative to Drupal 11. It is Drupal 11 plus a second upgrade. Waiting only delays the first step past the point where your current version stops receiving fixes.

The sources differ slightly on where you must start. Drupal.org's major-upgrade guide says "You can upgrade to a new major version from the last minor version of the previous major version." Acquia and Pantheon say Drupal 10.3 or later is enough for Drupal 11 to install. The difference does not change the advice: 10.6.x is the only supported Drupal 10 branch, so get there first, then run Upgrade Status on the Drupal 10 site against Drupal 11, which is how the module says checks must be run.

Which Drupal 11 minor and PHP version to target

Target Drupal 11.4, not 11.3. The 11.3.x branch loses security support in the same week as 10.6.x, so an upgrade that lands on 11.3 buys you nothing on the calendar.

The PHP choice is where the Drupal 12 decision really gets made. Drupal.org's PHP requirements table (updated 4 August 2026) shows Drupal 11.3 and 11.4 support PHP 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5, while Drupal 12.0 supports PHP 8.5 only. The same page adds: "From Drupal 12.0, PHP should be compiled with the argon2 support for password hashing." Drupal 10.6, by contrast, runs on PHP 8.1 to 8.4 but not 8.5.

Target	PHP security support until	What the later Drupal 12 upgrade still needs
Drupal 11.4 on PHP 8.3	31 December 2027	A PHP move to 8.5, plus the Drupal 12 code upgrade
Drupal 11.4 on PHP 8.4	31 December 2028	A PHP move to 8.5, plus the Drupal 12 code upgrade
Drupal 11.4 on PHP 8.5	31 December 2029	The Drupal 12 code upgrade, with argon2 confirmed in your PHP build

Drupal 11 needs PHP 8.3 at minimum, and that is the tempting choice because it is the smallest step. It also has the shortest runway and guarantees a second PHP upgrade before Drupal 12. If your contributed modules already run on PHP 8.5, moving to Drupal 11.4 on PHP 8.5 now means the Drupal 12 upgrade later is a code change, not a code change and a runtime change at once. If they don't, PHP 8.4 is the middle ground.

Check where you are starting from, too. PHP 8.1 reached end of life on 31 December 2025, and PHP 8.2 security support ends on 31 December 2026, three weeks after Drupal 10. A Drupal 10 site on either has two unsupported layers, not one. We walked through the same version arithmetic in upgrading PHP 8.1 to 8.4 or 8.5, and the PHP 8.2 date also drives the Magento 2.4.6 end of support decision.

The database and tooling bumps are the hidden part of the upgrade

Drupal 11 raises database minimums, and Drupal 12 raises some of them again. Drupal.org's database requirements page (updated 4 September 2026) lists the following.

Database	Drupal 10	Drupal 11	Drupal 12
MySQL	5.7.8+	8.0+	8.0+
MariaDB	10.3.7+	10.6+	10.11+
PostgreSQL	12+	16+	18+
SQLite	3.26+	3.45+	3.45+

If you run MySQL, the Drupal 11 move is the only database change you face for Drupal 12. On MariaDB or PostgreSQL you face two. A site on PostgreSQL 16 meets Drupal 11 but not Drupal 12, so if you are upgrading the database server anyway, going to a version that meets the Drupal 12 floor saves a second migration.

On tooling, Acquia lists Drush 13 and Composer 2.7.7 or later for Drupal 11. Check both in your build and deploy pipeline, not only on a developer machine.

Upgrade before December, or use the deadline to replatform

The strongest case for skipping the upgrade is that you would be paying for two migrations, 10 to 11 now and 11 to 12 later, on a platform you may not keep. That argument holds when the site has stopped being a content site. If the Drupal install now carries customer accounts, custom workflows and integrations held together by custom modules, those modules are what the Upgrade Status report will flag, and each one is a rewrite you would also do in a rebuild.

It fails on timing. A rebuild of a customer portal is not a five-week job; larger enterprise platforms typically take us 3-6 months, depending on complexity, integrations and scope. So the realistic sequence is the same either way: get to Drupal 11.4 on a supported PHP before the week of 7 December to stay inside security cover, then decide on the rebuild without a deadline forcing it.

We don't run Drupal upgrades. Our work starts where the replatform question does. If your Upgrade Status report shows the custom modules are the real product, and you are weighing a rebuild after the Drupal 11 stopgap, our web app development team builds web apps in Next.js, React, Node.js and PostgreSQL and will scope that rebuild against the cost of the 10 to 11 to 12 path. If the problem is a wider ageing stack rather than one site, that sits with our legacy application modernization practice.