Release Dates

  • KIP Freeze: February 25 2026 (Wednesday)
    • A KIP must be accepted by this date in order to be considered for this release. Note, any KIP that may not be implemented in a week, or that might destabilize the release, should be deferred.
  • Feature Freeze: March 18 2026 (Wednesday)
    • major features merged & working on stabilisation, minor features have PR, release branch cut; anything not in this state will be automatically moved to the next release in Jira
  • Code Freeze: April 8 2026 (Wednesday)
  • At least four weeks of stabilization will follow Code Freeze (taking holidays into account), meaning we expect to release no earlier than May 6 2026.


These dates are goals and subject to change, but we expect to stay on the Time Based Release Plan unless unexpected critical issues come up. While the earliest possible release date is 2w after code freeze, release candidates (RCs) will roll out as needed until the release vote passes.

The release manager is Mickael Maison 

How to Contribute

Before code freeze:

  • Participate in votes and discussions to land or postpone the open KIPs.
  • Review patches. We anticipate that this release, as it usually happens, will be bottlenecked mostly on reviews. The more reviewers, the more content we can fit in.
  • Write unit/integration/system tests. We want to preserve the tradition of high-quality releases in Apache Kafka. 

After code freeze:

  • Write more unit/integration/system tests. We want to preserve the tradition of high-quality releases in Apache Kafka.
  • Improve documentation.
  • Test the release candidates. 
  • Open blocker JIRAs on critical issues found. Open non-blocker JIRAs on any other issues found.
  • Fix critical bugs.
  • Review bug fixes.
  • Vote on release candidates. Even though only PMC votes are binding, community votes are super important as we evaluate the readiness of the release.

Open Issues

Key Summary T Created Updated Due Assignee Reporter P Status Resolution
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Also, feel free to refer to the 4.3.0 release page for more details of the included tickets (requires logging in to the Apache Kafka Jira project).

Planned KIP Content

Note: The planned content is not binding - the final content will be based on the features committed by the branch-cutting date.

See Kafka Improvement Proposals for the full list of KIPs.

If you do not see your KIP here and want to, please reply to the mailing list thread about the release!

KIPJIRAComponentStatus

KIP-1280: Update MirrorMaker to use KIP-877 to emit metrics

 

KAFKA-19149 - Getting issue details... STATUS

MirrorMakerKIP Accepted

KIP-1271: Allow to Store Headers in State Stores

KAFKA-20056 - Getting issue details... STATUS

StreamsKIP Accepted

KIP-1263: Group Coordinator Assignment Batching and Offload

KAFKA-20209 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Group CoordinatorKIP Accepted

KIP-1259: Add configuration to wipe Kafka Streams local state on startup

 

KAFKA-19943 - Getting issue details... STATUS

StreamsKIP Accepted

KIP-1258: Add Support for OAuth Client Assertion to client_credentials Grant Type

KAFKA-18608 - Getting issue details... STATUS

ClientsKIP Accepted

KIP-1251: Assignment epochs for consumer groups

KAFKA-20066 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Group CoordinatorKIP Accepted

KIP-1250: Add metric to track size of in-memory state stores

KAFKA-17895 - Getting issue details... STATUS

StreamsKIP Accepted

KIP-1247: Make Bytes utils class part of the public API

KAFKA-17939 - Getting issue details... STATUS

StreamsKIP Accepted

KIP-1240: Additional group configurations for share groups

KAFKA-20037 - Getting issue details... STATUS

CoreKIP Accepted

KIP-1239: Batch offset translation in RemoteClusterUtils

 

KAFKA-20229 - Getting issue details... STATUS

MirrorMakerComplete

KIP-1237: Deprecate group.coordinator.rebalance.protocols config

KAFKA-19740 - Getting issue details... STATUS

CoreKIP Accepted

KIP-1235: Correct the default min.insync.replicas to 2 for the __remote_log_metadata topic

KAFKA-19858 - Getting issue details... STATUS

CoreComplete

KIP-1219: Configurations for KRaft Fetch and FetchSnapshot Byte Size

KAFKA-19541 - Getting issue details... STATUS

CoreKIP Accepted

KIP-1211: Align the behavior of num.partitions and default.replication.factor for topic creation

KAFKA-19655 - Getting issue details... STATUS KAFKA-20001 - Getting issue details... STATUS

CoreKIP Accepted

KIP-1208: Add prefix to TopicBasedRemoteLogMetadataManagerConfig to enable setting admin configs

KAFKA-19590 - Getting issue details... STATUS

CoreComplete

KIP-1196: Introduce group.coordinator.append.max.buffer.size config

KAFKA-19519 - Getting issue details... STATUS

CoreComplete

KIP-1123: Rack-aware partitioning for Kafka Producer

KAFKA-19193 - Getting issue details... STATUS

ClientsKIP Accepted

KIP-1066: Mechanism to cordon brokers and log directories

KAFKA-19774 - Getting issue details... STATUS

CoreComplete

KIP-1035: StateStore managed changelog offsets

KAFKA-17411 - Getting issue details... STATUS

StreamsKIP Accepted

KIP-1244 Drop support for streams-scala in Kafka 5.0 (deprecate in 4.3)

KAFKA-19976 - Getting issue details... STATUS

StreamsComplete

Postponed to subsequent release

KIPJIRAComponentStatus

KIP-1278: Configurable Retry Mechanism for KafkaStatusBackingStore

KAFKA-20113 - Getting issue details... STATUS

ConnectUnder discussion







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