Confluence End of Life (EOL) Dates & Support Timeline

Confluence lifecycle status — the real story

Atlassian's end-of-support rule for Data Center is uniform: every feature release and every Long Term Support release is supported for two years after its own release date. There is no extended tier and no exception process — a version's end of support is fixed the day it ships, which is why the table above shows a steady two-year stagger with no long tail.

LTS releases do not live longer; they are the versions Atlassian backports fixes to within that two-year window, so they are the safer place to sit between upgrades. Confluence Server, as distinct from Data Center, lost all support on February 15, 2024, and three Confluence vulnerabilities on CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list are permanently unfixed on the Server versions attackers still find.

Verified against the vendor's lifecycle documentation on August 22, 2026.

Confluence release and support pattern

Across the 30 release lines with a published release date, Confluence has shipped a new line roughly every 2 months (median interval). A line typically stays supported for about 2 years from its release to its end-of-life date. 8 of the 30 tracked lines are designated long-term support, which is where the longer windows sit.

Of the 30 release lines tracked, 22 are past end of life and 8 are still within support. The newest line, 10.2, was released December 2, 2025. The next scheduled end of life is 9.1 on October 3, 2026 — 9 days from this build. The longest-supported line currently published is 10.2, to December 2, 2027.

Computed from the tracked release data at every build — the figures above are the dates in the table, restated, not an editorial estimate.

Confluence security intelligence

CISA KEV history: Confluence is named in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog 9 times, most recently on 2024-01-24, including use in ransomware campaigns. Derived from CISA's live catalog at every build.

Patch behavior after end of life: Hard cutoff — supported versions only. Three separate KEV-listed Confluence flaws (CVE-2022-26134, CVE-2021-26084, CVE-2023-22518) were fixed only in then-supported branches; end-of-life 5.x/6.x/non-LTS 7.x deployments never received fixes. Atlassian's fix windows follow its published support policy with no observed exceptions. (Observed behavior from our primary-source verification sweep, checked 2026-08-07 — never a guarantee of future fixes.)

What does Confluence end of life mean for your organization?

When a version of Confluence reaches end of life, the maintainers stop issuing security patches. Vulnerabilities discovered after this date are publicly disclosed on the National Vulnerability Database, exploit code appears on GitHub, and your systems remain permanently exposed.

The CVE blind spot: A CVE-based scan does not show the accumulation of unpatched vulnerabilities in EOL software. Some scanners flag unsupported versions of common products, but coverage varies, and none of them give you the date in advance. With a zero-day, nobody knows about the vulnerability. With EOL software, the vulnerability is public — listed, rated, and often weaponized — but no vendor patch is coming. This is one of the most dangerous gaps in enterprise security posture.

Organizations running EOL Confluence should treat it as a vulnerability class in their risk register, apply compensating controls (network segmentation, enhanced monitoring, access restriction), and prioritize migration to a supported version.

Your options when Confluence reaches end of life

There are four realistic paths. Which one is right depends far more on how long the system needs to keep running than on the version you are on today.

How to choose, in one question: how many more years does this system need to run? Under a year, extended support (where it exists) is usually cheaper than an emergency migration. One to three years, migrate — support purchased repeatedly costs more than doing the project once, and the project only gets harder as the version ages. Indefinitely, migrate now and plan the next migration before it surprises you.

Worth saying plainly, because vendors selling extended support rarely will: extended support is often the more expensive choice over a multi-year horizon. It is the right answer when a deadline is genuinely unreachable, not as a default. Compare the annual fee against the one-time cost of migrating before committing to either.

Formalizing decisions like this across your estate? Our free EOL policy template is a ready-to-adopt policy with risk tiers, remediation SLAs, and audit mapping — no signup, free to use and share.

Extended Support Options

If you cannot migrate immediately, extended support vendors provide continued security patches for EOL Confluence versions. This is a bridge, not a permanent solution — plan your migration in parallel.

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