.NET Support Dates

Once in a while, I want to know which versions of .NET are currently officially supported. Unfortunately, it may be hard to figure this out from the official Microsoft documentation. So I've decided to collect this information in this post. I intend to update this information when new .NET versions come out in the future, and with more precise dates if they're available.

This post will help you to determine whether a particular .NET version has any kind of official support from Microsoft (and thus if you should consider support in your software).

Please note that this post shouldn't be used as a legal or technical advice of any sort; always refer to the original documents published by Microsoft (I'm adding the links specifically for this).

Date of last update of this information: 2023-05-13.

.NET Framework

Notes

I wasn't able to find any sources for actual .NET Framework 3.5 support dates. Lifecycle FAQ sends the reader to the Lifecycle Policy document, which hasn't listed .NET Framework 3.5 as a separate entry. The clarification on the support life cycle lists it as unsupported, though it has no dates:

The original version of the .NET Framework 3.5 together with the .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 and the .NET Framework 3.0 SP1 are no longer in support.

The first recorded date of this document being publicly available is 2012-06-23 (see the Internet Archive).

According to the Lifecycle FAQ, certain .NET Framework versions (all starting from .NET Framework 4.6.2) are considered as parts of the corresponding operating systems, and thus have the same mainstream/extended support dates as the operating systems. For these versions, I've chosen the ones with the most extended supported dates, and used them for the table above. These versions are listed in the table below. If there are several Windows versions for the same .NET Framework version, then I've tried to choose the latest published one (since it may have better chance of its support to be extended). Normally, the server versions are supported longer than the client ones, so these one should be considered.

.NET Core and .NET

For .NET Core, .NET 5 and newer versions of .NET, the support policy is much clearer, so I see no point in reproducing that here.