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Version Policy

First of all, we recognize that the transitions from Pydantic V1 to V2 has been and will be painful for some users. We're sorry about this pain 🙏, it was an unfortunate but necessary step to correct design mistakes of V1.

There will not be another breaking change of this magnitude!

Pydantic V1

Active development of V1 has already stopped, however critical bug fixes and security vulnerabilities will be fixed in V1 for one year after the release of V2 (June 30, 2024).

Pydantic V2

We will not intentionally make breaking changes in minor releases of V2.

Methods marked as deprecated will not be removed until the next major release, V3.

Of course some apparently safe changes and bug fixes will inevitably break some users' code — obligatory link to XKCD.

The following changes will NOT be considered breaking changes, and may occur in minor releases:

  • Changing the format of ref as used in JSON Schema.
  • Changing the msg, ctx, and loc fields of ValidationError errors. type will not change — if you're programmatically parsing error messages, you should use type.
  • Adding new keys to ValidationError errors — e.g. we intend to add line_number and column_number to errors when validating JSON once we migrate to a new JSON parser.
  • Adding new ValidationError errors.
  • Changing repr even of public classes.

In all cases we will aim to minimize churn and do so only when justified by the increase of quality of pydantic for users.

Pydantic V3 and beyond

We expect to make new major releases roughly once a year going forward, although as mentioned above, any associated breaking changes should be trivial to fix compared to the V1-to-V2 transition.

Support for Python versions

Pydantic will drop support for a Python version when the following conditions are met:

  • The Python version has reached EOL.
  • <5% of downloads of the most recent minor release need to be using that version.