Drupal 12 ships December 7. Upgrade to Drupal 11.5 instead.
Two dates, two days apart, and most Drupal roadmaps I review this month have only noticed one of them:
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Week of Dec 7, 2026 | Drupal 12.0.0 and Drupal 11.5.0 are released |
| Dec 9, 2026 | Drupal 10 reaches end of life |
| Week of Sep 14, 2026 | Drupal 12.0.0-beta1 and 11.5.0-beta1 — a fortnight from now |
The instinct, when the new major and your deadline arrive in the same week, is to jump straight to Drupal 12 and be done with it. Don’t. For the overwhelming majority of sites, the correct target is Drupal 11.5 — released the very same day, and supported until Drupal 13, which has no date at all yet. Here is why.
The blocker nobody’s host is ready for: PHP 8.5
Drupal 12 requires PHP 8.5. This is not a proposal — it was committed to core in January 2026, following the policy that each new major targets the latest stable PHP available at its beta window. Drupal 12 also moves to Symfony 8, raises database minimums (PostgreSQL 18, MariaDB 10.11; MySQL 8.0 and SQLite 3.45 hold), and switches password hashing to Argon2id.
PHP 8.5 went stable in November 2025. Ask your hosting provider today whether it is available on your plan, and in your CI image, and in your local environment. On managed platforms and most European shared hosting, the honest answer in December will be no. Drupal 11.5, by contrast, runs on the PHP you already have.
That single line is the whole argument for most sites. Everything below is what happens to the teams that ignore it.
What leaves core on December 7
Seven modules are removed in Drupal 12.0. Five have a contrib home waiting: Ban, Contact, Field Layout, History and Telephone.
Read that list again and note Contact. On a large share of Drupal sites the core contact form is the lead
funnel. It does not break loudly on upgrade — it simply is not there any more unless you added the contrib module
to composer.json first. Check your own site now: if contact is enabled, it is a line item in your upgrade plan,
not a detail.
The one with no contrib home: Migrate Drupal
Here is the part being under-reported. Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI are removed in Drupal 12.0 and are not moving to contrib. No replacement project, per core’s own deprecated-extensions list.
The consequence is blunt: if you are still on Drupal 7 — end of life since January 2025, and I still find these in audits every month — then Drupal 12 has no supported path from your site. The migration tooling exists in Drupal 11 and disappears in 12. You migrate D7 → D11 while the tooling is still in core, or you inherit a significantly harder problem.
If that is you, the December 7 date is not your deadline. September is.
Contrib will not be ready on day one
I maintain 24 contributed modules. Here is what a major release actually looks like from the maintainer side: the compatibility work starts at beta, lands over the following months, and the long tail of smaller modules takes longer still. That is not neglect — it is the normal rhythm, and it is why I told you the same thing about Drupal 11.
Upgrading to a major in its first weeks means being the person who finds the bugs. That is a fine role to play on a personal site and a poor one on a platform with an editorial team and a revenue number attached.
So: the plan
- Now → September. Get to the latest Drupal 10 minor (10.6.x) or, better, onto Drupal 11 already. Run Upgrade Status and Drupal Rector.
- If you are on Drupal 7: migrate to Drupal 11 now, while Migrate Drupal is still in core. This is the genuinely urgent case.
- October–November. Land on Drupal 11.4, test properly, ship before the Q4 freeze.
- Week of December 7. Take the 11.5 minor. It is a routine minor update, not a major.
- 2027. Move to Drupal 12 when your host offers PHP 8.5 and your contrib tree is green. You will have all of Drupal 11’s support window to do it in.
Who should go to Drupal 12 in December
I am not arguing against Drupal 12 — I am arguing against upgrading to it in week one. Go early if you control your own infrastructure and can run PHP 8.5, your contrib list is short and mainstream, you have real test coverage, and you have the appetite to file issues rather than just consume fixes. Contributing early is how the release gets good. Just do it deliberately, not because two dates happened to collide on the calendar.
For everyone else, December 7 offers two doors. Take the boring one.
Deciding between 11.5 and 12 for a platform you cannot afford to break? A migration audit gives you the answer with your actual contrib list and hosting constraints in it — before the Q4 rush prices it.