Django 6.2.x

Django 6.2 is the next Long Term Support release, expected in April 2027. It takes over from Django 5.2, whose extended support runs until April 2028, so the two overlap for a full year and there is no rush to move the day 6.2 lands.

These notes are still under development. Django’s own 6.2 release notes are largely unwritten at this point, and most sections are still placeholders. What follows is what has been confirmed so far and will change as the release takes shape.

Release Highlights:

• New listurls management command prints the URLs from your root URLconf alongside the view class or function that serves each one, which is a genuinely useful way to audit a large project.
• makemigrations now tracks changes to unmanaged models, covering added, removed, and altered fields, constraints, and renames.
• Database-backed caches gain probabilistic culling, running the cull on a percentage of writes rather than every write, tuned with CULL_PROBABILITY and defaulting to 10%.
• import_string() now resolves modules, not only already-imported submodules.
• The default PBKDF2 iteration count rises again, from 1,500,000 in 6.1 to 1,800,000.
• New BaseCommand.requires_settings attribute controls whether an ImportError from the settings module is suppressed.

Upgrade Gotchas:

• Requires Python 3.12, 3.13, or 3.14, the same range as 6.0 and 6.1.
• JsonResponse flips its safe argument to default to False rather than True. If you relied on the old default to reject non-dict objects, that guard is gone, and the safe parameter itself is deprecated.
• Minimum asgiref version rises from 3.9.1 to 3.12.1.
• The admin now returns HTTP 403 rather than leaking existence: view_on_site requires view or change permission, and the history view checks permissions before it checks whether the object exists.
• MiddlewareMixin moves from django.utils.deprecation to django.middleware. The old import path is deprecated.
• Calling QuerySet.aiterator() after prefetch_related() without a chunk_size is deprecated.
• DjangoJSONEncoder now omits zero milliseconds when serialising datetime and time values, which changes the exact strings in serialised output.

Because 6.2 is an LTS, this is the release most projects will want to target. If you are on 5.2 today, you have until April 2028, but planning the hop while both are supported is much less painful than doing it after 5.2 goes end of life.