Laravel 12

Laravel 12 is an intentionally low-disruption continuation of Laravel 11 rather than a structural reset. It retains the streamlined application skeleton introduced in Laravel 11 and focuses on refreshed first-party starter kits. The React, Vue, and Livewire starter kits provide current authentication scaffolding and are designed to give new applications a more complete starting point. Laravel 12 also adds a first-party WorkOS AuthKit starter kit for applications that need hosted authentication features such as social login, passkeys, and organization support. Existing Laravel 11 applications generally have a short upgrade path because the framework does not introduce a broad redesign of established application APIs.

Laravel 12 remains within its supported window, so staying on it does not by itself create an immediate framework-support or security-maintenance gap. The practical cost is mainly opportunity cost: teams will not automatically receive capabilities, dependency refreshes, and developer-experience improvements introduced by later Laravel lines. A long-lived Laravel 12 deployment can also accumulate upgrade work as application code, first-party packages, PHP, database drivers, front-end tooling, and third-party packages move forward independently. The risk is lower than remaining on an unsupported line, but postponing routine upgrades can turn a small future migration into a larger dependency and testing project.

If the application is on Laravel 11, review the Laravel 12 upgrade guide, update the framework and first-party packages together, and run the full automated test suite before deploying. Treat starter-kit changes as optional for established applications; do not replace working authentication scaffolding solely to match a new starter kit. For new applications, evaluate the React, Vue, Livewire, and WorkOS AuthKit starter kits against the team’s existing front-end and identity requirements. Keep PHP, Composer dependencies, queue workers, scheduled tasks, and deployment environments aligned with Laravel 12 requirements, and establish a regular dependency-review cadence so a later framework upgrade remains incremental.