A scannable “what’s new” for every major Go release. Go ships a major version roughly every six months (February and August) under the Go 1 compatibility promise, so upgrades are almost always painless.
Go has no LTS. The Go team provides security and critical bug fixes for the two most recent major releases only. In practice, staying within one or two versions of the latest is the supported path — there is no long-term branch to pin to. Version numbers below link to the official release notes.
Release History
| Version | Released | Highlights |
|---|---|---|
| 1.26 | Feb 2026 | Green Tea GC default (10–40% GC overhead reduction), self-referential generics, go fix rewrite with modernizers, crypto/hpke, errors.AsType(), log/slog.NewMultiHandler(), post-quantum TLS hybrids default, ~30% faster cgo calls |
| 1.25 | Aug 2025 | Container-aware GOMAXPROCS, experimental Green Tea GC, testing/synctest graduated, experimental encoding/json/v2 |
| 1.24 | Feb 2025 | Generic type aliases, faster Swiss Table maps, tool dependencies in go.mod (go tool), os.Root, weak pointers, FIPS 140-3 |
| 1.23 | Aug 2024 | Range-over-function iterators (iter), unique package, timer/ticker GC improvements |
| 1.22 | Feb 2024 | Per-iteration loop variables, range over integers, enhanced net/http routing patterns, math/rand/v2 |
| 1.21 | Aug 2023 | min/max/clear builtins, slices/maps/cmp packages, structured logging (log/slog), PGO GA |
| 1.20 | Feb 2023 | errors.Join (wrapping multiple errors), profile-guided optimization (preview) |
| 1.18 | Mar 2022 | Generics (type parameters), native fuzzing, multi-module workspaces |
| 1.16 | Feb 2021 | embed package, modules on by default, io/fs abstraction |
| 1.13 | Sep 2019 | Error wrapping (%w, errors.Is/errors.As), new number literal syntax |
| 1.11 | Aug 2018 | Go Modules (experimental), WebAssembly port |
| 1.7 | Aug 2016 | context package moved into the standard library, SSA compiler backend |
| 1.5 | Aug 2015 | Compiler & runtime rewritten in Go, concurrent low-latency GC, GOMAXPROCS defaults to all CPUs |
| 1.0 | Mar 2012 | First stable release — the Go 1 compatibility guarantee begins |
Go 1.27 is expected around August 2026. Work-in-progress release notes are already published — highlights include generic methods,
encoding/json/v2GA, a newuuidpackage,crypto/mldsa(post-quantum ML-DSA), and ~30% faster small allocations. See the release history for the latest published versions and the milestone tracker for what’s landing.
How Go Support Works
- No LTS, no exceptions. Only the latest two major releases get fixes. Upgrading promptly is the intended workflow.
- The compatibility promise means code written for Go 1.x keeps compiling on later 1.y releases, which makes those frequent upgrades low-risk.
- Since 1.21, the toolchain line in
go.modlets a module request a minimum Go version and auto-download it.
Sources
- Go release history — official notes for every version
- Go release policy — the two-release support window
- endoflife.date/go — support timelines