How Fast Is PHP 8.3 Being Adopted? Latest Usage Stats Compared to 8.2

Usage Statistics

Let’s start with the percentage of projects using each PHP version today and compare it with the three previous releases, omitting any versions with less than 1% usage.

Visualizing these data looks like this:

Compared with PHP 8.2, the adoption speed of PHP 8.3 appears slightly faster: 6.4% of projects used PHP 8.3 within the first two months after its release, versus 4.7% for PHP 8.2.

Additionally, the share of PHP 7.* continues to shrink—considering the end‑of‑life support for 7.*, this is a positive development. The PHP 8.1 series ended over a year ago. PHP 8.1 is now the oldest supported version, receiving its final security update on 25 November this year. Updating your PHP installation is therefore essential.

Switch to the historical overview chart to see how version usage evolves over time:

Required Versions

Next, I used Nikita’s popular‑package analyzer to download the 1,000 most popular Composer packages and scanned them to determine the minimum PHP version each requires. The results are shown below:

Two important observations:

The table shows the minimum required version. Packages that require at least PHP 8.0 can also run on PHP 8.1, PHP 8.2, and PHP 8.3.

If you count the numbers, you’ll notice variations each year, and not every package lists a valid version string.

Rather than comparing absolute numbers, it’s better to plot these data for relative comparison, allowing us to see changes over time.

On progress, I’d like to remind open‑source maintainers of their power and responsibility. Imagine if all modern open‑source packages only supported actively developed PHP versions; this would likely encourage faster updates, leading to a healthier, higher‑performance, and more secure ecosystem. Maintainers have significant influence here.

Also remember that enforcing a newer minimum PHP requirement does not automatically block older projects from using your code—out‑dated projects can still download older package versions, so there’s little reason for maintainers to avoid raising the requirement.

That’s all the data I’m sharing in this PHP version statistics report. Feel free to email me with thoughts or questions.