Drupal 10 ends 9 December, and for most teams the last date to ship a change is in November

Drupal 10 reaches end of life on 9 December 2026. As of 27 August 2026 that is 104 days, or just under fifteen weeks.

We published the decision framework in July: which branches still carry security coverage, the three paths out of the deadline, why the Drupal 12 release date complicates two of them, and the six pieces of evidence that answer the question. That piece stands and this one does not repeat it. This is about the calendar. How much of those fifteen weeks is available, what fits inside it, and the checkpoints that tell a team whether it is still on schedule.

Subtract the change freeze from the calendar

Ninety-two days separate 8 September from 9 December. The number a team can plan against is smaller, and the reason is the organisation’s own release calendar rather than anything Drupal publishes.

Most enterprises run a change freeze in the last stretch of the year. Retail and consumer businesses freeze for peak trading. Universities freeze around term-end and results processing. Public-sector bodies freeze around financial year-end closes and holiday cover. The start dates vary, and mid-November is a common one.

Where a freeze begins in mid-November, the last date a production change can land is around 16 November, which is ten weeks from 8 September. The freeze does not pause the deadline: 9 December falls inside it, and a site that has not moved by the time the freeze starts will still be on Drupal 10 when support ends, with the next available deployment window in January.

This is our reasoning rather than drupal.org guidance. The project publishes one date. How far back to plan from it depends on a calendar only the organisation holds, and the first useful thing a team can do this week is find out when its own freeze starts. If budget approval is also in the path, that queue sits in front of everything else here.

What fits in ten weeks

An in-place upgrade to Drupal 11 fits, where the July piece’s conditions hold. Drupal 11 released on 2 August 2024, so contributed-module coverage has had two years to mature, and the work is module compatibility and deprecated-API fixes against known floors of PHP 8.3 and MySQL 8.0. None of that is open-ended: the work can be sized before anyone commits to it, then scheduled like any other release.

A replatform to a different CMS does not fit. Discovery, content modelling, migration, rebuild, testing and editor training do not compress into eleven usable weeks on an estate large enough to have been running Drupal for years.

That changes what the countdown is asking. The question is not which platform is right, which is the July piece’s subject. The question is which of three positions the organisation is in on 9 December.

On Drupal 11. The upgrade landed before the freeze. Supported, and the deadline is closed.

On Drupal 10.6, with a scoped and funded migration running. Unsupported from 10 December, with the exposure bounded by a plan that has a date on it. For a team heading off Drupal, this is the achievable position, and it is a defensible one to put in front of an auditor or a board.

On Drupal 10.6, with nothing scoped. Unsupported from 10 December with no end date on the exposure. This is the position worth naming now, because it is reached by not deciding rather than by deciding.

Work back from 9 December

These checkpoints are ours. Drupal publishes the date; the intervals below are how we plan against it, and a team with a faster procurement process or a smaller estate can compress them.

By the end of September. The module inventory is complete and the Upgrade Status report has been run, so the size of the upgrade is a number rather than an estimate. This is three weeks of the window for a task that takes days.

By mid-October. The decision is made and written down. Fifty-five days remain at that point, which is enough to land an upgrade before a mid-November freeze and not enough to start one from scratch much later.

By mid-November. The change is in production, or the freeze has it and the site is in position two or three above.

The diagnostic in that sequence is the first checkpoint. If the module audit has not started by the end of September, an in-place upgrade landing before a mid-November freeze is unlikely, and the realistic goal becomes getting a migration scoped and funded so that December arrives with a bounded exposure rather than an open one.

The Drupal 7 precedent does not transfer

Teams that ran Drupal 7 through the last decade learned that the end-of-life date moves, and they learned it three times. The original date was November 2021. In June 2020 it went to 28 November 2022, citing the economic effect of the pandemic on upgrade budgets. In February 2022 it went to 1 November 2023. In August 2023 the Drupal Association announced 5 January 2025 and described it as the final extension of support for Drupal 7.

Three years of slippage across three announcements set an expectation. The instinct it produced, that the deadline will move again if enough sites are not ready, is the most common reason a countdown gets ignored.

Drupal 10’s date was set differently. The core team fixed it in June 2025 and tied it to no other release, which is why Drupal 12 slipping would not move it. Drupal 12 is scheduled for the week of 7 December 2026, the same week Drupal 10’s support ends; the July piece works through what that does to the “wait for 12” path.

Drupal 7 also had a second exit, and it came from vendors. The Drupal Association ran a Drupal 7 Extended Security Support Provider Program to vet commercial providers, and in July 2024 it named HeroDevs the inaugural partner, so organisations that had run out of runway could buy security coverage past the EOL date while the date itself held. drupal.org has announced no equivalent programme for Drupal 10, so a plan that assumes one is speculative in a way a plan built on the published date is not.

If the window closes with you still on Drupal 10

The exposure that starts on 10 December is the July piece’s subject and it has not changed. What changes with the calendar is the price of the move itself. A migration scoped in September starts from the codebase available today. The same migration scoped in March 2027 starts from one further behind, against modules that have had another quarter of releases pass them by, and the arithmetic runs the same way every quarter after that.

For organisations with formal audit obligations the position is more concrete, which is why this deadline lands hardest in government and education, where the platform running the estate is itself subject to review, and its support status is a question somebody will be asked in writing.

Where the destination is Payload, migrating from Drupal to Payload covers what the move involves in practice, and /migrate/drupal is where to tell us what you are running. A free consultation and a scoped, fixed quote come before any commitment, so putting a number against the replatform costs a conversation. Ingersoll Rand moved its China sites off Oracle Content Manager across more than twenty brand tenants with WAYF, on a different source system and the same class of problem: a large multi-brand estate on a platform with a closing horizon.

Drupal 10 is one of several platforms with a dated support horizon this cycle. Our CMS end-of-life page carries the current dates for Drupal, Sitecore, AEM, TYPO3, Kentico and the rest, each sourced from the vendor’s own lifecycle page.

FAQ

How long is left before Drupal 10’s end of life? Drupal 10 reaches end of life on 9 December 2026. From 27 August 2026 that is 104 days, or just under fifteen weeks. The figure that matters to most teams is smaller, because a production change has to land before whatever Q4 change freeze the organisation runs, not before 9 December itself. Where a freeze starts in mid-November, the working window is closer to eleven weeks.

Can we complete a replatform to another CMS before 9 December 2026? Starting from a standing start now, our view is no. Discovery, content modelling, migration, rebuild, testing and editor training do not compress into eleven usable weeks on an estate large enough to have been on Drupal for years. Replatforming remains the right answer for some of these organisations; 9 December is simply the wrong date to complete it by. The achievable goal is to be on the 10.6 branch with a scoped and funded migration already running, which bounds the exposure instead of leaving it open.

Will Drupal 10’s end-of-life date be extended the way Drupal 7’s was? Nothing published by drupal.org suggests it. Drupal 7’s date moved three times, from November 2021 to November 2022 to November 2023 and finally to 5 January 2025, which the Drupal Association announced as the final extension of support. Drupal 10’s date was set differently: the core team fixed it in June 2025 and tied it to no other release, so a Drupal 12 slip would not move it. Teams whose planning instinct comes from the Drupal 7 years are working from a precedent that does not carry over.

We are on Drupal 10.5. Does this countdown apply to us? Not in the same way, because your deadline has already passed. Only the 10.6 branch carries security coverage now, so a site on 10.5 or earlier is running without security coverage today, independent of the December date. Getting onto 10.6 comes before any planning against 9 December. Our July piece opens on that distinction and on what end of life removes.

Sources

• Drupal core release schedule — the 9 December 2026 end-of-life date and the week of 7 December 2026 for Drupal 12
• Policy: define explicit Drupal 10 end-of-life date (#3524111) — the June 2025 decision to fix the date independently of the Drupal 12 release
• Extending Drupal 7’s End-of-Life, PSA-2020-06-24 (24 June 2020) — the first extension, from November 2021 to 28 November 2022
• Drupal 7’s End-of-Life extended to November 1, 2023, PSA-2022-02-23 (23 February 2022) — the second extension
• Drupal Association, Drupal 7 End of Life Officially Announced for 5 January 2025 (14 August 2023) — the third and final extension, and its description as such
• Drupal Association Announces HeroDevs as Inaugural Partner for Drupal 7 Extended Security Support Provider Program (9 July 2024) — the certified paid-support route past the Drupal 7 EOL date
• Drupal 11.0 will require PHP 8.3 and MySQL 8.0 — the version floors for an in-place upgrade
• WAYF, Drupal 10 ends on 9 December 2026: upgrade to Drupal 11, wait for Drupal 12, or replatform (28 July 2026) — the supported-version table, the three paths, and the evidence to collect before deciding

The change-freeze reasoning, the three positions, and the work-back checkpoints in this piece are WAYF’s own planning view, not drupal.org guidance.