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Laravel History & Versions

How Laravel began as one developer's alternative to CodeIgniter in 2011, how it became the most popular PHP framework, every major version on one timeline with its support dates, and which version to use today.

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How Laravel started

In 2011 Taylor Otwell, a .NET developer who had moved to PHP, found that CodeIgniter (the popular framework of the time) lacked features he wanted, such as built-in authentication. He wrote his own framework, inspired by Ruby on Rails and ASP.NET MVC, and released Laravel 1 as a beta in June 2011.

Laravel grew quickly because it made PHP pleasant: expressive routing, the Eloquent ORM, Blade templates, and later the Artisan command line, migrations and queues. Laravel 4 (2013) rebuilt the framework as Composer packages (the "Illuminate" components), which let the PHP community reuse its pieces. Taylor Otwell founded Laravel LLC, which funds the open-source framework through commercial services such as Forge, Vapor, Nova and Laravel Cloud.

Timeline

  1. Laravel 13Current
    • PHP 8.3 minimum, the Laravel AI SDK, JSON:API resources, queue routing, more PHP attributes, semantic and vector search
  2. Laravel 12Security fixes until Feb 2027
    • New React, Vue and Livewire starter kits; a release focused on minimal breaking changes
  3. Laravel 11End of life · Mar 2026
    • A slimmer application structure (configuration in bootstrap/app.php), PHP 8.2 minimum, health routing, Reverb WebSockets
  4. Laravel 10End of life · Feb 2025
    • PHP 8.1 minimum, native type declarations in the skeleton, the Process facade, Pennant feature flags
  5. Laravel 9End of life · Feb 2024
    • PHP 8.0 minimum, Symfony 6 components, Flysystem 3, a new route:list design
  6. Laravel 8End of life · Jan 2023
    • Class-based model factories, job batching, migration squashing, Jetstream
  7. Laravel 7End of life · Mar 2021
    • Blade component tags, custom Eloquent casts, the HTTP client, Airlock (later Sanctum)
  8. Laravel 6End of life · Sep 2022
    • Long-term support release; semantic versioning begins; lazy collections
  9. Laravel 5.5End of life · Aug 2020
    • Long-term support; package auto-discovery, API resources, Horizon
  10. Laravel 5.0Historic
    • The modern folder structure, Form Requests, the scheduler, Socialite
  11. Laravel 4.0Historic
    • Rebuilt on Composer as the Illuminate components
  12. Laravel 3.0Historic
    • The Artisan command line, migrations, Eloquent improvements
  13. Laravel 1.0Historic
    • The first public (beta) release

The support policy

Since Laravel 6, versions follow semantic versioning and a yearly major release (in the first quarter). Each major version gets 18 months of bug fixes and 2 years of security fixes. Minor and patch releases ship every week and don't break your code, so upgrading within a major version is routine (composer update).

Version comparison

Laravel 11 Laravel 12 Laravel 13
Released March 2024 February 2025 March 2026
Minimum PHP 8.2 8.2 8.3
Bug fixes until September 2025 August 2026 September 2027
Security fixes until March 2026 February 2027 March 2028

Which version should you use? Laravel 13 for new projects. Laravel 12 apps should plan their upgrade before security fixes end in February 2027; anything older is out of support. Tools such as Laravel Shift automate much of an upgrade.

Official resources

Last reviewed 21 October 2026. Release and support dates come from the official release pages linked above.

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