Laravel 13: Launch Date and New Features (News from Laracon EU)

On stage of Laracon EU 2026, Taylor Otwell has made a few announcement of what's coming to Laravel framework. Let's review them.

The Launch Date

The new Laravel 13 version will be released on March, 17th, in a few weeks.

Historically, Laravel new major versions came out once a year, in February/March.

Also, on the same date, Laravel AI SDK will be tagged as officially stable and out of beta.

The new Laravel 13 version will not have any breaking changes, so the upgrade should be really smooth and easy. But there will be quite a few new optional things to try out.

New PHP Attributes Everywhere

Laravel 13 will introduce around 15 new options where you can use PHP attributes instead of the older syntax. These are optional, only if you want to use them.

This is an examples of a typical Queue class:

class ReserveFlight implements ShouldQueue
(
    use Queueable;
 
    public $tries = 5;
    public $maxExceptions = 3;

And this is how you can move the properties to PHP attributes in Laravel 13:

use Illuminate\Queue\Attributes\MaxExceptions;
use Illuminate\Queue\Attributes\Tries;
 
#[Tries(5)]
#[MaxExceptions(3)]
class ReserveFlight implements ShouldQueue
(
    use Queueable;
    // ...

Other examples of new PHP attributes:

Eloquent Models:

#[Fillable(['name', 'email', 'password'])]
#[Hidden(['password', 'remember_token'])]
class User extends Authenticatable
{
    // ...

Middleware and Authorize in Controllers:

class FlightController extends Controller
{
    #[Middleware(LogRequests::class)]
    #[Authorize('view', 'flight')]
    public function show(Flight $flight)
    {
        // ...

In PHP 8.5, you can even do THIS with Closure:

class FlightController extends Controller
{
    #[Middleware(LogRequests::class)]
    #[Middleware(static function (Request $request, Closure $next) (
        info( 'Whoa...');
        return $next($request);
    })]
    public function show(Flight $flight)
    {
        // ...

Starter Kits: Teams Function

The old starter kit Jetstream had a functionality of Teams, so the new starter kits will get it back, but implemented a bit differently.

In the Laravel 13 starter kits, you will be able to launch two different teams by URLs in the different browser tabs, which was not possible in the old Jetstream.

Here are a few screenshots from Laracon EU stage, how it will look like:

Starter Kits: Sign in with Passkey

Another long-requested feature was integration of Passkeys, they will be used in starter kits and in underlying Laravel Fortify.

(Sorry for the quality of the photos)

Product News and Futuristic Demo

In addition to Laravel 13, Taylor announced Laravel Cloud API and CLI coming in a few weeks, with free trial for Cloud coming soon. So follow him on Twitter/X to get the news around that.

Finally, he showed on stage what can happen if you use Laravel products seamlessly together:

He added a bug on the website, and showed a live-demo.

• Nightwatch caught a bug
• Taylor prompted OpenCode (with GPT-5.3-Codex): "Fix latest issue in Nightwatch"
• AI agent used Nightwatch MCP and started automatically fixing the bug
• The Laravel Cloud instance was created for testing
• AI created a Pull Request
• Finally, the jawdropping moment - OpenClaw called Taylor and told "There's a PR in the repo, do you want me to merge it?"

And then THIS happened.

Bug was fixed and auto-deployed. All with just voice, without writing any code.

You can (re-)watch it on YouTube, follow this link.

Wow. Basically, Taylor made a glimpse into the future of how AI agents will work for us, if we have the systems and tools in place.

So yeah, exciting times for what's to come - both in Laravel and in AI-powered development.

I will cover Laravel 13 news in more depth when it comes out, subscribe to my weekly newsletter to get all the news first!