[Policy] Define explicit Drupal 10 end of life date of 2026 December regardless of Drupal 12 release

gábor hojtsy → credited catch → .

gábor hojtsy → credited longwave → .

I had the same suggestion in 📌 [policy no-patch] Discuss LTS options Active .

With the original discussions that went into https://www.drupal.org/blog/drupal-10-will-be-supported-until-the-releas... → there were a handful of main considerations:

1. The possibility of a dependency releasing a new major release and dropping support for the one we use in Drupal 10 before our own EOL - e.g. a Twig 4, jQuery 5, or CKEditor 6. This currently seems very unlikely with any of our main dependencies, and the closer we get to December 2026 the less likely it is that it will happen.

2. A dependency releasing a security issue, and not supporting the minor release that the most recent Drupal 10 depends on. This already happens fairly frequently, we've had a couple of recent examples with Twig. CKEditor5 also comes close sometimes. At the moment Drupal 10 is reasonably up-to-date with PHP dependencies, and we have the option of 10.6.x (December 2025) and even 10.7.x (June 2026) releases if we really needed to.

4. A security vulnerability in actual core code, that affects all three major branches. This will obviously be extra work, but security.drupal.org has access to gitlab now, so MRs against multiple core branches (with test runs) are much easier to manage. And it pales in comparison to having to worry about Drupal 7.

3. Contrib modules feeling obligated to support Drupal 10, 11, and 12 simultaneously. There is no real obligation to do so but a lot of contrib authors do try to support all major branches.

Contrib maintainers can have one minor branch that supports 10/11 and one minor branch that supports 11/12 - this avoids a single branch having to support all three major versions at once. This approach is documented in 🌱 Guidelines for semantic versioning and Drupal core support Active

Also with 📌 Defer disruptive 11.3 deprecations for removal until 13.0 Active , and also OOP hooks and annotations -> attributes, a lot of Drupal 11 deprecations won't get removed until Drupal 13, meaning the required changes to support Drupal 12 should be quite minimal. We've also backported some API additions from 11.x into 10.4 and 10.5.

Related: 📌 Drupal Core strategy for 2025-2028 Active