Laravel 13 was released on March 17, 2026, announced by Taylor Otwell at Laracon EU, and represents the most AI-forward release in the framework's history — while maintaining Laravel's tradition of near-zero breaking changes on upgrade.
Key additions:
- First-party AI SDK — previously a beta package, now a production-stable, provider-agnostic SDK that works with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other providers by swapping a single config value, letting you add AI features to a Laravel app without stitching together third-party clients.
- PHP Attributes for configuration — models, listeners, notifications, mailables, and console commands can now be configured with PHP 8 attributes (e.g.
#[Table('users', key: 'user_id')]) as an alternative to defining properties like$table,$fillable, and$hidden. This is fully opt-in; existing property-based code keeps working unchanged. - Passkey (WebAuthn) authentication — built-in support for passwordless login using device biometrics or security keys, alongside traditional password auth.
- JSON:API-compliant resources — standards-based API responses out of the box.
- Semantic and vector search — Laravel Scout gained a Turbopuffer engine plus semantic/hybrid search support on the database engine, enabling embedding-based search through the familiar Scout builder API.
- Queue, cache, and database refinements — including new Eloquent methods like
insertOrIgnoreReturning, improved connection handling, and Microsoft SQL Server DSN support.
Requirements: PHP 8.3+ minimum (up from PHP 8.2 in Laravel 12). Laravel 12 remains fully supported and widely used, so teams can adopt Laravel 13 on their own timeline — the upgrade path is designed to be short (often under ten minutes for a standard app) once the PHP version requirement is met.