.NET 8 and .NET 9 Reach End of Support on November 10 as .NET 11 Ships; Microsoft's Table Lists November 14, 2028 for Both .NET 10 and .NET 11
Microsoft's materials give November 10, 2026 as the end-of-support date for .NET 8 (LTS) and .NET 9 (STS), the day .NET 11 shipped; its releases table lists November 14, 2028 for both .NET 10 (LTS) and .NET 11 (STS).
Editor's Note ·
- Clarification:
- The article says Microsoft's support page "gives no support terms or end dates for these offerings". The page gives no end dates for any vendor, but its Canonical entry does state which versions it covers (".NET 6 is supported in Ubuntu 22.04+" and ".NET 8 is supported in Ubuntu 22.04+"), and its other entries describe scope (HeroDevs: "Never Ending Support (NES) for .NET 6+" on Windows and Linux; TuxCare: "certain out-of-support .NET versions"). The page states no durations or prices.
Overview
Microsoft’s materials give November 10, 2026 as the end-of-support date for .NET 8 and .NET 9, the same day it released .NET 11. The Announcing .NET 11 post says ”.NET 8 and .NET 9 reach end of support on November 10, 2026”, and the .NET releases table lists both in its end-of-life section, with 8.0.34 and 9.0.23 as final patch versions. The same table gives .NET 10 (Long Term Support, LTS) and .NET 11 (Standard Term Support, STS) one end-of-support date, November 14, 2028. Dates in this article are the calendar dates in Microsoft’s tables, which give no time of day.
The dates in Microsoft’s tables
Release types, release dates and end-of-support dates below come from the .NET releases table. The .NET 11 release notes say .NET 11 “will be supported on multiple operating systems for two years, from November 10, 2026, to November 14, 2028”. The last column is the Herald’s own count, in days from release date to end-of-support date.
| Release | Type | Released | End of support | Days (Herald’s count) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| .NET 8 | LTS | November 14, 2023 | November 10, 2026 | 1,092 |
| .NET 9 | STS | November 12, 2024 | November 10, 2026 | 728 |
| .NET 10 | LTS | November 11, 2025 | November 14, 2028 | 1,099 |
| .NET 11 | STS | November 10, 2026 | November 14, 2028 | 735 |
Reading the table, the Herald notes two pairs of releases that share an end date: LTS .NET 8 with STS .NET 9, and LTS .NET 10 with STS .NET 11. That pairing is the Herald’s observation from the table, not a statement by Microsoft. Microsoft’s release policies say “LTS and STS releases differ only by support duration”.
An independent tracker, endoflife.date, lists the same dates: 10 Nov 2026 for .NET 8 and .NET 9, and 14 Nov 2028 for .NET 10. Its page says it was last updated on 14 October 2026, and its list as fetched on November 10 starts at .NET 10, with no .NET 11 entry.
What the policy says happens next
The release policies say support ends “when its published end of support date has passed”, typically on a patch day, and add: “There will not be any patches after that point.” Per the .NET blog, the November 10 servicing updates for .NET 10, .NET 9 and .NET 8 “include security and non-security fixes”. The 8.0.34 release notes are dated November 10, while the 8.0.33 notes are dated October 25; 8.0.33 carried the out-of-band fixes the Herald reported earlier.
The policy also describes tooling consequences. The month after a version goes out of support, Microsoft says, it marks that version “as optional and out of support in Visual Studio”. Six months after, in-support SDK versions produce warning NETSDK1138 when a project targets it.
Microsoft’s upgrade guidance in the .NET 11 post reads: “Choose .NET 11 for the latest capabilities, or .NET 10 if its LTS lifecycle fits your requirements better.” The post also describes a .NET Upgrade canvas that “gives you a visual view of a GitHub Copilot upgrade session”.
Why the window is contested
DEVCLASS reported on June 30 (UTC) that a developer had opened an issue in the .NET repository arguing the LTS window is “too short for upgrade and adoption cycles”. In the issue, opened on June 12 (UTC), the author describes a large application of about 5 million lines of code on .NET 8 and writes that “LTS and STS converge on the same EOL date”. Suggestions include “Longer LTS support duration” and “Extended (possibly paid) support options”. DEVCLASS also says a similar 2023 complaint drew comment from program manager Richard Lander, who said Microsoft had discussed longer windows and paid extended support but “opted to continue with only the free support plan”.
As of November 10 the issue is open with eight comments, which include differing views. One commenter wrote of “telemetry showing about 50% of the deployed versions of my software out there are running EOL versions”. Another wrote that “Just because something is EOL or out of support does not mean that it stops working”, while the release policies say continuing to use an unsupported version “will expose you to security vulnerabilities”. A third wrote that switching their own long-running web application from .NET 8 to .NET 10 took five minutes.
Options outside Microsoft
Microsoft’s support page lists commercial providers other than Microsoft: Canonical and Red Hat on their Linux distributions, HeroDevs with “Never Ending Support (NES) for .NET 6+”, and TuxCare, which it says provides commercial support for certain out-of-support .NET versions. The page gives no support terms or end dates for these offerings.
What the cited sources do not say
None of the cited sources reports Microsoft announcing paid extended support for .NET 8 or .NET 9, or a change to the three-year and two-year windows. None gives a count of applications still running .NET 8 or .NET 9; the only usage figure is one commenter’s telemetry about their own software. The cited independent items predate the end-of-support date: DEVCLASS is from June 30, and endoflife.date was last updated on October 14, so no cited independent item reports on the November 10 transition after it happened.