End of Life

RHEL 8 end of life: dates and what to upgrade to

RHEL 8 end of life dates, what each support phase means, what to upgrade to, and how to check a server by hand and with Stackurity.

TL;DR

RHEL 8 reaches the end of its maintenance support on May 31, 2029.
Full support already ended on May 31, 2024, so RHEL 8 is in its maintenance phase now.
After May 31, 2029 the only route to further fixes is Red Hat's paid Extended Life Cycle Support add-on, which runs to May 31, 2033.
The longest supported upgrade target is RHEL 10, with maintenance support to May 31, 2035, followed by RHEL 9 to May 31, 2032.
Stackurity matches end of life dates against your inventory every day, so you hear about it before the deadline.

What reaches end of life and when

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was released on May 7, 2019. Red Hat defines several support phases, and both Red Hat's own lifecycle page and endoflife.date list the same dates for RHEL 8.

Full support ended on May 31, 2024. In this phase Red Hat ships new features and hardware enablement along with fixes.
Maintenance support ends on May 31, 2029. In this phase the focus is on important security fixes and urgent bug fixes, and this is the date most people mean when they search for RHEL 8 end of life.
Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) add-on ends on May 31, 2033. It is an add-on that you buy from Red Hat to keep receiving fixes after maintenance support has ended.

For planning, treat May 31, 2029 as the date by which RHEL 8 servers should be gone or covered by a purchase decision. The add-on is a bridge, not a destination.

What end of life means

When a release leaves maintenance support, it stops receiving security updates for newly found vulnerabilities. Every flaw that is discovered afterwards stays open on those servers unless you pay for the add-on or move on. That has three practical effects.

Security exposure: new vulnerabilities in the kernel, libraries and services are not fixed in the base release.
Compliance and audits: auditors and customers commonly treat an unsupported operating system as a finding, which can block certifications and contracts.
Application support: software vendors drop support for operating system releases that their own supplier no longer maintains, and a call to their support desk may end with a request to upgrade first.

Migrations take longer than most teams expect, because they involve testing, change windows and application owners. Starting while there is still support left gives you room to do it without pressure.

What to upgrade to

Two newer releases are supported, and both are listed in Red Hat's lifecycle table. The one with the longest support comes first.

RHEL 10: released on May 20, 2025, full support to May 31, 2030, maintenance support to May 31, 2035, and the ELS add-on to May 31, 2039.
RHEL 9: released on May 18, 2022, full support to May 31, 2027, maintenance support to May 31, 2032, and the ELS add-on to May 31, 2036.

RHEL 10 gives you the most runway, so it is the natural choice for new builds. RHEL 9 can make sense when an application is certified only for it. Follow these steps:

List every RHEL 8 server, image and virtual machine template, with the applications each one runs and the owner of each application.
Choose a target release for each workload, preferring RHEL 10 and using RHEL 9 only where an application requires it.
Test the application on the target release, and read Red Hat's documentation for the upgrade path it supports for your case. In many estates a fresh build and a data migration is safer than an in-place upgrade.
Migrate in waves, keep the old server until the new one has served real traffic, and retire it afterwards.
Confirm that no RHEL 8 system remains in the inventory, and record the result for your audit trail.

How to check one server by hand

cat /etc/redhat-release
cat /etc/os-release
hostnamectl
rpm -q redhat-release

If the output names release 8, the server is covered by this guide. For a container image, run the same commands inside a container started from the image, because the base layer decides the release, not the host.

How Stackurity flags it

Stackurity keeps one live inventory of your servers, applications, repositories and container images, and matches it against end of life data every day. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the distributions whose packages are assessed, so a RHEL 8 server shows up with its end of life date as well as its vulnerabilities, and each item is ranked so the most urgent upgrades come first. The remediation guide explains how the upgrade cards work, and pricing lists the plans. Runtimes installed outside a package manager are checked for end of life only. You can try it with a free trial: start a free trial.

FAQ

When does RHEL 8 reach end of life?

Maintenance support for RHEL 8 ends on May 31, 2029, according to Red Hat's lifecycle page and endoflife.date. Red Hat also sells an Extended Life Cycle Support add-on that runs to May 31, 2033.

Is RHEL 8 still getting security updates?

Yes, during the maintenance support phase, which runs until May 31, 2029. Full support ended on May 31, 2024, so new features and most non-critical fixes are no longer the focus of that phase.

What should I upgrade RHEL 8 to?

RHEL 10 has the longest support: maintenance support to May 31, 2035. RHEL 9 is supported to May 31, 2032. Pick the newest release your applications are certified for.

What is the RHEL 8 extended support end date?

The Extended Life Cycle Support add-on for RHEL 8 ends on May 31, 2033. It is a paid add-on from Red Hat, so check the terms with Red Hat before you rely on it.