When is Craft CMS 6 Out?
Craft CMS 6 is expected in late 2026 with content releases, scheduled drafts, approval workflows, and a migration to Laravel framework.
Craft CMS 6 is in development. Beta releases are expected around Q3 2026, with general availability targeted for Q4 2026. Pixel & Tonic has published a fair amount of detail on what's coming.
The release timeline
Based on the announced roadmap, beta is roughly a year out as of writing, with GA following once beta testing has shaken out the issues. Timelines can slip, but that's the planning horizon.
When Craft 6 hits GA, Craft 5 automatically becomes Long-Term Support (LTS) and gets five years of security updates from that point. Sites on Craft 5 will have no pressure to upgrade immediately.
New features
Pixel & Tonic has outlined several substantial additions:
Content Releases — group related changes across multiple entries and publish them together rather than piece by piece.
Scheduled Drafts — time-based publishing for drafts, without manual intervention at the point of release.
Content Importing — native import in core, rather than custom scripts or third-party plugins.
Content Approval Workflows — editorial review built into Craft, for organisations with established editorial processes.
Edit Page Commenting — discussion alongside the content in the control panel, rather than in separate channels.
Element Activity Logs — who changed what and when, for auditing and troubleshooting.
The Laravel migration
The biggest technical change: Craft 6 moves from Yii 2 to Laravel. Laravel has a far larger ecosystem and developer pool, which is good news for Craft long-term.
Pixel & Tonic knows this creates plugin compatibility challenges and is building a backward compatibility adapter to keep existing plugins working through the transition. For site owners, the framework swap is largely invisible — templates don't care. The impact lands on plugin developers and anyone with custom modules.
Control panel
Craft 6 brings visual and accessibility improvements: built-in dark mode, a mobile-first redesign, and WCAG 2.2 as the target.
What this means for your site
On Craft 5: you're in a good spot. Stay on 5, keep applying patches, and evaluate Craft 6 when it lands.
On Craft 4: plan the upgrade to Craft 5 well before Craft 6 ships. Doing 4 → 5 now and 5 → 6 later is easier than trying to jump direct to 6 while also dealing with deprecated Craft 4 features.
On Craft 3 or earlier: upgrade now. The longer you leave it, the harder the migration gets.
Planning ahead
Knowing the direction helps with current decisions. If content approval workflows or scheduled publishing would solve something you face today, you might build a stopgap knowing the native feature is coming. If you're writing custom code now, the Laravel move is worth keeping in mind.
Andrew is Technical Director at Mutual, a Craft CMS Partner agency. He has been building with Craft CMS since its public beta in 2012 — working through every major version from Craft 1 to Craft 5 — and has delivered over 100 sites for clients including Apple, Transparency International, and Arts University Bournemouth.
He writes about Craft CMS on the Mutual blog and has contributed to net Magazine. At Mutual, he leads development of Mutual One, a marketing platform built on Craft CMS as its foundation.
He has spoken about Craft CMS to undergraduate students at the University of Brighton and Canterbury Christ Church University, and appeared on the Devmode.fm podcast. He has also trained development teams at other agencies in working with the platform.
