WordPress 7.0 has a release date again — with a 4-week cushion past the deadline when an update had been promised. If everything stays on track, we’ll have this new major version on May 20.

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Program transcript

Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this episode, you’ll find the information from April 20 to 26, 2026.

WordPress 7.0 now has a release date: May 20, 2026 — six weeks after the originally planned April 9.

The new schedule published this week confirms what was already apparent: the cycle is effectively restarting, just not in name. RC3, planned for May 8, behaves like a new Beta 1, and RC4 will function as the real Release Candidate 1.

On April 24, ahead of all this, a call went out to hosting providers to test compatibility, with a dedicated tool that stress-tests multi-user connections in the editor’s collaborative screens.

The interesting detail is that the team has kept the RC numbering rather than reverting to betas — something we already explained: if WordPress published a “Beta 7” after an RC2, PHP’s version_compare function would not recognize it as newer, and automatic updates would break. So RC3 and RC4 are, in practice, a new beta and a new release candidate in disguise. What we don’t know yet is whether these six extra w...

WordPress 7.0 in 3 Weeks