php 8.5 ships six weeks before php 8.1 reaches end of life

PHP 8.5 arrived on November 20, 2025 with a pipe operator and a built-in URL parser, six weeks before PHP 8.1 lost all security support.

2025-11-20 release 3 sources · 3 primary 1 min read

// at a glance

what happened

PHP 8.5 was released on November 20, 2025.[1]
New in 8.5: a built-in URI extension following RFC 3986 and WHATWG URL, the |> pipe operator, clone-with syntax, the #[\NoDiscard] attribute, persistent cURL share handles, and array_first()/array_last().[1]
8.5 deprecates the backtick operator as an alias for shell_exec(), non-canonical casts such as (integer) and (boolean), case statements ended with a semicolon, and null as an array offset. It also removes the disable_classes INI setting.[1]
PHP 8.5 gets active support until 31 Dec 2027 and security support until 31 Dec 2029.[2]
PHP 8.1 reached end of life on 31 Dec 2025; its last release was 8.1.34.[3]
PHP 8.2 gets security fixes only until 31 Dec 2026, 8.3 until 31 Dec 2027 and 8.4 until 31 Dec 2028.[2]
php.net says users of unsupported branches are 'strongly urged to upgrade to a current version, as using older versions may expose you to security vulnerabilities and bugs that have been fixed in more recent versions of PHP'.[3]