Laravel 10 end of life: your upgrade options

We normally recommend the last one. Treat the first as a stopgap when a full upgrade can’t start for a while, and treat Laravel 11 as a milestone inside the project, never as the destination.

Laravel’s Laravel 11 upgrade guide estimates 15 minutes, which assumes none of the following touch you. On an older application, some usually do.

• Column changes in migrations. A change() call now has to restate every attribute you want to keep, such as unsigned, default and comment. Missing ones are dropped. Squashing migrations with php artisan schema:dump is the documented way around rewriting old ones.
• Float and double columns. The double and float types were rewritten, and the unsignedDecimal, unsignedDouble and unsignedFloat methods were removed. Money and measurement columns deserve a close look.
• First-party packages. Cashier Stripe, Passport, Sanctum, Spark Stripe and Telescope no longer load their own migrations, so you publish them. Passport 12 also turns the password grant off by default, which can break older API clients without any code error.
• Rate limiting. Limits moved to seconds. If your code builds Limit objects by hand or reads decayMinutes, those values change meaning.
• Server versions. PHP 8.2 and curl 7.34 are the new minimums, and SQLite users need 3.26 or later.

Carbon 3 is optional at this step but becomes mandatory in Laravel 12. Its diffIn* methods can return floats and negative values, which quietly changes date arithmetic in reports and billing, so test those paths whenever you make the switch.

1. Move PHP to 8.3 on Laravel 10 and release that on its own. Any fault is then clearly about PHP.
2. Go to Laravel 11 on a branch and deal with migrations, packages and rate limits.
3. Continue to 12 and then 13 on the same branch, reading each guide.
4. Release the result as one change, staged, with a tested rollback plan. Our upgrade checklist covers this in full.

Prices start from the published tiers on our upgrade service page, with a range of $799–$2,999+ in USD after a free assessment, invoiced in USD, GBP, EUR or INR.