Red Hat Enterprise Linux (red-hat-enterprise-linux, redhat) End of Life
Red Hat
Support policy
Each RHEL major release receives five years of Full Support followed by five years of Maintenance Support, for ten years of standard life cycle. A paid Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) add-on can extend critical security fixes for a further four years.
Notes
RHEL's life cycle has four stages. A standard subscription covers Full Support (five years) plus Maintenance Support (five years) — ten years in total.
Full Support includes bug fixes, security fixes, hardware enablement and minor releases. Maintenance Support narrows this to security fixes and selected critical bug fixes. The paid ELS add-on extends critical security fixes further.
The most commonly misread stage is the Extended Life Phase. Red Hat's lifecycle table
shows it as "Ongoing", which looks like continued support, but no bug fixes, security
fixes, or hardware enablement are provided during this period — only access to existing
content and limited technical support. This site therefore does not include it in
extended_until.
ELS is an add-on entitlement that must be present on the account; it is not included in a standard subscription. EUS (Extended Update Support), which pins specific minor versions, is a separate mechanism from the major-version dates shown here.
Sources
- https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata
- https://access.redhat.com/product-life-cycles/
Last verified: 2026-08-03