Ruby on Rails End of Life: Rails 6.1 EOL, Rails 7.0 EOL — What's Still Supported in 2026

endoflife-ai Posted on May 30 • Originally published at endoflife.ai Ruby on Rails End of Life: Rails 6.1 EOL, Rails 7.0 EOL — What's Still Supported in 2026 # security # ruby # rails # webdev The Rails maintenance policy is lean by design: only the most recent minor version of the most recent two major versions receives security patches . Everything else is on its own. That policy creates a faster EOL cadence than most teams expect. Rails 7.0 felt modern — it shipped with Hotwire, import maps, and CSS bundling. It reached end of life on April 1, 2025 . Here's the current state of the Rails lifecycle. Rails EOL Schedule Version End of Life Status Rails 4.2 Apr 2020 ❌ EOL Rails 5.2 Jun 2022 ❌ EOL Rails 6.0 Jun 2023 ❌ EOL Rails 6.1 Jun 30, 2024 ❌ EOL Rails 7.0 Apr 1, 2025 ❌ EOL Rails 7.1 Oct 1, 2026 ⚠️ Security only Rails 7.2 Aug 1, 2027 ✅ Full support Rails 8.0 Nov 1, 2027 ✅ Full support The Compounding Ruby Problem Rails 6.x applications typically run on Ruby 2.6, 2.7, or 3.0. All three are EOL: Ruby 2.6 — EOL March 2022 Ruby 2.7 — EOL March 2023 Ruby 3.0 — EOL March 2024 A Rails 6.1 application on Ruby 2.7 has two compounding EOL layers. New CVEs in either the framework or the runtime will never be patched. EOL Risk Score for Rails 6.1: 82 Critical View → endoflife.ai/score/rails/6.1 Understanding the Rails Maintenance Policy The Rails project publishes three maintenance states: Full maintenance — bug fixes + security fixes (latest two minor versions) Security maintenance only — security fixes only, no bug fixes Unsupported — no fixes of any kind Today: Rails 8.0 — full maintenance Rails 7.2 — full maintenance Rails 7.1 — security maintenance only until October 2026 Rails 7.0 and earlier — unsupported What's New in Rails 8 Rails 8.0 (November 2024) is a significant release focused on reducing external infrastructure dependencies: Solid Cache — database-backed caching (replaces Redis for most use cases) Solid Queue — database-backed background jobs (replace