Symfony 7.4 LTS or 8.1: Which Should You Use?

Short answer: for a new project that should stay on one release for years, choose the long-term support release, Symfony 7.4. Choose 8.1 if you are on PHP 8.4 or newer and are happy to move to a new minor release regularly. If you are still on 6.4, plan the move before its bug-fix support ends in November 2026. The dates below are from Symfony's own releases page as it read on October 6, 2026.

Source: Symfony releases, notifications and release checker, read October 6, 2026. Version numbers, dates and requirements change, so check the page itself before you decide.

How to choose

These recommendations are our reading of those dates, not Symfony's advice.

• New project, long lifespan, team that does not want frequent upgrades: Symfony 7.4. It has the longest support window in the table.
• New project on PHP 8.4 or newer, with a habit of upgrading often: Symfony 8.1 gives you the latest features, but its support window is much shorter.
• Existing 6.4 project: treat November 2026 as the date to have a plan. After that only security fixes continue, until November 2027.
• Existing project on an older release than 6.4: the page lists only the versions above as maintained, so check the page and plan an upgrade.

Check your PHP version first

The PHP requirement decides more than preference does. Run this on the server and on your development machine:

php -v

If the version is below 8.2, Symfony 7.4 and 8.1 are not an option until PHP is upgraded. Between 8.2 and 8.3, 7.4 is the newest you can run. From 8.4, either works.

Related on this site

Our Symfony cheat sheet is written for Symfony 7, which is the line 7.4 belongs to. For a security question that comes up on every version, see is_granted in Twig.