CentOS 6 End of Life Date
CentOS 6 end-of-life date, support status, and CVE risk. Data reconciled from official vendor documentation and endoflife.date at every build; the source of each date is on the product page.
CentOS 6 was released on July 10, 2011 and support ended on November 30, 2020 — a supported lifespan of 9 years and 5 months, in line with the 10 years median for CentOS releases. The last patch it will ever receive is 6.10, published July 3, 2018 — 2 years and 5 months before support ended. It has been without security patches for 5 years and 10 months.
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When CentOS 6 reaches end of life, the maintainers stop issuing security patches for this version. CVEs discovered after the EOL date are publicly disclosed on the National Vulnerability Database with no patch available. Exploit code frequently appears on GitHub within days of disclosure.
The CVE blind spot: A CVE-based scan does not show the ongoing accumulation of unpatched vulnerabilities in EOL software versions. Some scanners flag unsupported versions of common products, but coverage varies, and none of them give you the date in advance. Running CentOS 6 past its EOL date creates a growing attack surface that a clean scan result does not rule out.
Migrate to a supported version or implement compensating controls — network segmentation, enhanced monitoring, restricted access — while migration is underway.