As you may know, this year we updated the Laravel release cycle to include one major release per year. These release changes would typically indicate that a Laravel 9 release is due in September of this year. However, as you may know, Laravel uses a variety of community-driven packages as well as nine Symfony components for a number of features within the framework.
By delaying the release, we can upgrade our underlying Symfony components to Symfony 6.0 without being forced to wait until September 2022 to perform this upgrade.
This means that the upcoming Laravel release schedule will look as follows: We are continuing to deliver exciting new improvements to the Laravel 8.x release series.