Drupal 10 reaches end of life on December 9, 2026. Drupal 12 ships the same week. After that date, Drupal 10 sites get no more security releases from the Drupal project.
In the first week of October 2026, drupal.org's usage stats showed about 229,700 sites still reporting Drupal 10. Add about 51,000 on Drupal 9 and 41,500 on Drupal 8, both already out of support, and that is roughly 320,000 reporting sites that are out of support or will be within weeks.
If one of them is yours, here is what the date means and what I would do with the time left.
The site does not stop working on December 10. Pages still load and editors can still publish.
What stops is security fixes. When the next core vulnerability is announced, Drupal 11 and 12 get a patch and Drupal 10 does not. Contributed modules follow the same path: maintainers drop Drupal 10 from new releases, so a fix you need may only exist for a version you cannot install.
For a public site with forms, logins or an editor team, that is a risk you will eventually have to explain to someone.
This is the good news, and it is the part people mix up with Drupal 7.
Drupal 7 to 10 or 11 is a rebuild. The architecture changed, so content, theme and custom code move to a new site. Drupal 7 itself reached end of life on January 5, 2025.
Drupal 10 to 11 is closer to a large update. The code base is the same lineage. The work is in three places:
Drupal upgrades get planned as code work. In my experience the failures come from the hosting side.
On one Drupal 10 site I moved a nonprofit's deploys from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. The one step that broke on the first try had nothing to do with Drupal code: the build had to rewrite the Composer web root to the directory layout the hosting platform expected. Small, specific, and invisible until a real deploy ran. I wrote that up in Moving a Cultural Nonprofit's Drupal Deploys From Jenkins to GitHub Actions.
Check these before you touch a module:
Not right away. Drupal 12 arrives the same week Drupal 10 ends, and contributed modules need time to catch up with a new major version. You also cannot jump from 10 straight to 12. The safer path is the latest Drupal 11 release now, and Drupal 12 later, once the modules you depend on support it.
Universities, associations and agencies often run dozens of Drupal sites on different versions. Upgrading them one by one is slow and each one becomes its own project.
Two things help. First, an inventory: every site, its Drupal and PHP version, its modules and who owns it. Second, a shared platform, either a multisite or a common build and hosting setup, so the next major upgrade is done once instead of forty times.
Then December 9 is not your deadline. Your site has been without community security support since January 2025. Plan a migration to Drupal 11 as a rebuild: content migration, a new theme that keeps your current design if you want it, and custom modules rewritten or replaced. Keep the Drupal 7 site behind a CDN with a strict cache and limited admin access until the new one is live.
If you run one Drupal site or fifty and want a second pair of eyes on the platform underneath, see CMS and website hosting or book a free call from that page.
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