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Release Dates
- KIP Freeze: (8th July 2026)
- 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: (29th July 2026)
- 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: (12th Aug 2026)
- At least four weeks of stabilization will follow Code Freeze (taking holidays into account), meaning we expect to release no earlier than September 9 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 Omnia Ibrahim
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
Also, feel free to refer to the 4.4.0 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!
| KIP | JIRA | Component | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
KAFKA-17125 - Getting issue details... STATUS GA 4.2 KAFKA-20116 - Getting issue details... STATUS Adding warmup tasks KAFKA-20169 - Getting issue details... STATUS Adding static group membership | Core / Streams | "GA with limited feature set" with AK 4.2 Adding new feature to get close to being feature complete. | |
KAFKA-20444 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Clients | KIP Accepted | |
KAFKA-20196 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Core | Complete | |
KAFKA-18775 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Tools | KIP Accepted | |
KIP-1306: Extend ConsumerRebalanceListener with Consumer-Aware methods | KAFKA-20385 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Clients | KIP Accepted |
| KIP-1220: Unify kafka-broker-api-versions tool to cluster-tool and support bootstrap controllers | KAFKA-19663 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Tools | KIP Accepted |
| KIP-1245: Enforce 'application.server' <server>:<port> format at config level | KAFKA-17164 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Streams | Complete |
| KIP-1242: Detection and handling of misrouted connections | KAFKA-20246 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Clients | Complete |
| KIP-1241: Reduce tiered storage redundancy with delayed upload | KAFKA-19893 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Tiered-Storage | Complete |
| KIP-1232: Deprecate broker.id config | KAFKA-18628 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Core | KIP Accepted |
| KIP-1200: Deprecate ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata | KAFKA-19566 - Getting issue details... STATUS Deprecate ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata KAFKA-20401 - Getting issue details... STATUS Remove ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata in 5.0.0 | Core | Complete |
KAFKA-19469 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Core | KIP Accepted | |
| KIP-1332: Dynamic memory allocation for the Kafka producer | KAFKA-20576 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Clients | KIP Accepted |
KIP-1327: Prevent Hot Data Loss on Partition Expansion for Reset Offset Policy | KAFKA-20539 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Clients | KIP Accepted |
KIP-1325: Add restore.buffered.records.per.partition to cap Kafka Streams state-restore memory | KAFKA-19992 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Streams | KIP Accepted |
| KRaft | KIP Accepted | ||
KAFKA-14648 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Clients | KIP Accepted | |
| Streams | KIP Accepted | ||
KIP-1323: Initialization of share group offsets from a specific offset or a file | KAFKA-20524 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Tools | Complete |
KAFKA-20618 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Streams | KIP Accepted | |
KAFKA-20167 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Streams | Implemented | |
KAFKA-20088 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Core | Complete | |
| KIP-1291: Extended I/O Metrics Collection | KAFKA-20223 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Core | KIP Accepted |
| KIP-1321: Headers aware StreamPartitioner | KAFKA-20197 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Streams | KIP Accepted |
| KIP-1340: Expose Both Mapped Key and Stream Key in Streams-GlobalKTable Joins | KAFKA-18731 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Streams | KIP Accepted |
| KIP-1357: Add broker side custom assignors for "streams" groups | KAFKA-20683 - Getting issue details... STATUS | Streams | KIP Accepted |
Postponed to subsequent release
| KIP | JIRA | Component | Status |
|---|---|---|---|