Laravel 13 arrived in March. If you’re still on 11, you’re skipping a major. That sounds worse than it is, because 12 and 13 were both deliberately small releases. The framework side of this is genuinely quick. The PHP requirement is the part that will determine your timeline.
Check the one thing that actually blocks you
Laravel 13 requires PHP 8.3 minimum, and everything else in this post is easy by comparison, because this is the item that turns a morning into a quarter if you’re on 8.1 or 8.2.
php -v
composer why-not php 8.3
Do the PHP upgrade as a separate, earlier piece of work. Bundling a language major with a framework major means debugging two categories of failure at once with no way to attribute them, which is the mistake I keep watching people make.
The upgrade itself
composer require laravel/framework:^13.0 --with-all-dependencies
Then first-party packages, which version independently and are the usual source of a failed resolve:
composer show laravel/* --direct
Bump each to its 13-compatible constraint. If Composer refuses, read the conflict. It’s almost always one package with a narrow constraint rather than a genuine incompatibility.
Then:
php artisan config:clear && php artisan cache:clear
php artisan about
composer test
Of those, php artisan about is the fastest confirmation that the framework and all of
its drivers came up cleanly.
Why this is easier than it sounds
Both releases emphasized backward compatibility, and Laravel 13 in particular shipped essentially no breaking changes beyond the PHP floor. The official upgrade guide estimates about ten minutes for many applications, and for once that’s not marketing. If your app is on 11 and reasonably conventional, it may be a version bump and a test run.
For anything less conventional, Laravel Shift handles the mechanical parts of a two-major jump and is worth the fee purely for the diff it produces, which doubles as a checklist.
Read both upgrade guides rather than only the 13 one, because skipping a major means the 12 changes apply to you as well and they aren’t repeated in the 13 notes.
What you get
Worth knowing what the upgrade is buying, since it’s all optional:
- PHP attributes for framework configuration, as an alternative to convention and method calls. Optional and fully backward compatible.
- Passkeys support out of the box: WebAuthn without assembling it from packages. The most immediately useful item here for anything with user accounts.
- First-party JSON:API support, with resource classes handling serialization, relationship inclusion, sparse fieldsets, and compliant response headers. If you’ve hand-rolled JSON:API before, this is a large amount of code you get to delete.
Queue::route(), which puts the queue and connection for each job class in one place in a service provider rather than scattered across job definitions.Cache::touch(), for extending a TTL without a read and rewrite.- A Reverb database driver, and the Laravel AI SDK reaching stable.
Timing, if you’re deciding whether to wait
Laravel’s policy is 18 months of bug fixes and two years of security fixes for every release, with no LTS designation since Laravel 6. In practice that puts Laravel 12’s bug fixes ending 13 August 2026 and its security fixes 24 February 2027; Laravel 13 runs to roughly Q3 2027 for bug fixes and Q1 2028 for security.
So if you’re on 11, you’re already outside bug-fix support and running on security patches alone. Not an emergency, and not something to leave much longer either. A zero-breaking-change major is the cheapest upgrade you will ever get, and they get more expensive the longer you leave them.
The order I’d run it: PHP to 8.3 first, ship that, live with it for a week, then the framework jump as its own change.
Having done it
I’ve run this on a couple of projects that needed it, and it was straightforward both times. The official ten-minute estimate is optimistic as a total but honest about the framework step itself. It was a bump, a cache clear, a test run, and then it was finished.
Both projects were already on PHP 8.3, which is the reason it went that smoothly, and it’s why I keep separating the two upgrades in this post. Every hour I’ve ever lost to a Laravel major has been a PHP major or a dependency wearing a Laravel costume. Get the language sorted first and the framework jump really is an afternoon.