Symfony 7.4 and Symfony 8.0 will be released at the same time at the end of November 2025. Both will provide the exact same set of features, but with important differences. Keep reading to learn how to prepare your projects for these new Symfony versions.

Symfony Major and Minor Versions

Symfony releases a minor version (7.0, 7.1, 7.2, etc.) every six months, at the end of May and at the end of November. These minor versions contain many new features, but once released, they do not add new features.

For example, Symfony 7.3 was released in May 2025 with many new features. The following patch versions, released monthly, will only contain bug fixes: 7.3.1 contains the same features as 7.3.0 plus bug fixes; 7.3.2 contains the same features as 7.3.0 and more bug fixes; and so on.

Symfony Deprecations

Besides new features and bug fixes, software projects also evolve by renaming configuration options, adding or removing method arguments, and similar changes. If Symfony introduced these changes without a transition period, your applications would break immediately after upgrading.

Symfony uses a different approach based on deprecations. When a change is required, Symfony keeps the old behavior (marking it as deprecated) and adds the new behavior at the same time. This makes Symfony generate a log message whenever your application relies on a deprecated feature.

Some deprecations introduce a small performance cost. If Symfony added deprecations continuously, at some point the overhead would become noticeable. This is why Symfony removes all deprecations every two years when releasing a new major version. In practice:

  • Symfony 7.0 (Nov. 2023): no deprecations
  • Symfony 7.1 (May 2024): introduces some deprecations
  • Symfony 7.2 (Nov. 2024): includes 7.1 deprecations plus new ones
  • Symfony 7.3 (May 2025): includes 7.1 and 7.2 deprecations plus new ones
  • Symfony 7.4 (Nov. 2025): includes all previous 7.x deprecations plus new ones
  • Symfony 8.0 (Nov. 2025): no deprecations

Symfony 8.0 = Symfony 7.4 - deprecations. Both versions share the exact same features, but 7.4 contains all deprecation layers and 8.0 contains none.

Planning the Upgrade to 7.4 and 8.0

Symfony 8.0 does not include deprecated features, so you cannot use it if your application still relies on any of them. Your upgrade path should follow these steps:

  1. Upgrade your project from your current Symfony version to Symfony 7.4
  2. Check the deprecated features used in your application
  3. Fix all deprecations
  4. You are now ready to upgrade to Symfony 8.0

The best way to detect deprecated features in your application is to run your test suite as:

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$ php bin/phpunit --display-deprecations

The output lists all deprecations, which can be:

  • Direct: caused by your own application code and fixable by you
  • Indirect: caused by bundles and libraries in vendor/ that still use deprecated features; report these to the corresponding projects so they can fix them

If your application does not have tests and you don't have time to write a full test suite, consider adding smoke tests. They are quick to write and help you identify deprecations.

A Community Effort

There are thousands of Symfony bundles, and your application probably uses some of them. Bundles often require updates to prepare for major Symfony releases. Help maintainers by reporting deprecations and contributing fixes. Let's make the Symfony ecosystem ready for Symfony 8.0.

LTS and Regular Versions

Another important difference between Symfony 7.4 and 8.0 is that 7.4 is a long-term support (LTS) version and 8.0 is a regular version:

  • LTS: receives bug fixes for 3 years and security fixes for 4 years
  • Regular: receives bug fixes and security fixes for 8 months

An LTS version looks attractive because of the extended support, but consider the following:

  • If you choose to stay on Symfony 7.4 LTS, you'll get bug fixes until November 2028 and security fixes until November 2029. However, you won't get any new Symfony features for two years, until the next LTS version (8.4) is released in November 2027.
  • If you choose to upgrade to Symfony 8.0, you'll receive bug and security fixes only until July 2026, but you'll be able to upgrade to 8.1 (May 2026), 8.2 (Nov. 2026), 8.3 (May 2027), and 8.4 (Nov. 2027) without much effort. This gives you all new Symfony features and continuous maintenance, and you can fix deprecations gradually between minor releases instead of all at once when upgrading to the next major.

The official Symfony recommendation is to use regular versions whenever possible.

Published in #Symfony