Benefits of Upgrading Your Laravel Project to the Latest Version

The Hidden Cost of Staying on an Old Laravel Version

I talk to development teams every week who are running Laravel 8 or 9 in production. When I ask why they have not upgraded, I hear the same answers: "It works fine," "We do not have time," and "The upgrade looks risky."

All three of those answers are understandable. All three of them are also costing money.

Laravel 9 reached end of life in February 2024. Laravel 8 reached end of life in July 2023. Running an EOL framework version means zero security patches from the core team, an ever-growing list of packages that no longer support your version, and a codebase that becomes harder to hire for with every passing month.

I recently upgraded a client's Laravel 9 + PHP 8.1 application to Laravel 12 + PHP 8.4. The project took three weeks. The results: a 34% reduction in average API response time, three security vulnerabilities patched that existed in their old dependencies, and a development team that could finally use features they had been reading about for two years.

This article lays out exactly what you gain — concretely and specifically — by upgrading.

Laravel Version Support Timeline

If you are not on Laravel 11 or 12 today, you are running unsupported software.

Performance Gains: What the Numbers Actually Look Like

PHP 8.4 JIT and OPcache Improvements

PHP 8.4 (released November 2024) continues the JIT compiler improvements started in PHP 8.0. For Laravel applications specifically, the gains are most visible in CPU-bound operations: complex Eloquent query building, large collection transformations, and recursive data processing.

In benchmarks across real Laravel applications (not synthetic micro-benchmarks), PHP 8.4 vs PHP 7.4 shows 30–50% improvement in requests per second at the same hardware spec. PHP 8.4 vs PHP 8.1 shows a more modest but still meaningful 10–15% improvement in throughput.

Laravel 12 Performance Improvements

Laravel 12 ships with significant improvements to the query builder's internals. Eloquent eager loading — one of the most common performance bottlenecks in Laravel apps — has been optimised to reduce redundant query preparation. In applications with complex nested eager loads, this alone reduces database round-trips measurably.

The new Lazy Collections improvements in recent versions mean processing 100,000 database records no longer requires loading them all into memory. With LazyCollection, you process records one at a time from the database cursor:

// Old approach: loads all 100,000 orders into memory at once
Order::where('status', 'pending')->get()->each(fn($order) => $this->process($order));

// New approach: streams from database, constant memory usage
Order::where('status', 'pending')->lazy()->each(fn($order) => $this->process($order));

Developer Experience Improvements Worth Having

PHP 8.4: Property Hooks

Property hooks (introduced in PHP 8.4) let you define get/set behaviour directly on class properties without separate getter/setter methods. This cleans up a huge amount of boilerplate in domain models:

// Before PHP 8.4
class Order {
    private float $_total;

    public function getTotal(): float { return $this->_total; }
    public function setTotal(float $value): void {
        if ($value < 0) throw new InvalidArgumentException('Total cannot be negative');
        $this->_total = $value;
    }
}

// PHP 8.4: property hooks
class Order {
    public float $total {
        set(float $value) {
            if ($value < 0) throw new InvalidArgumentException('Total cannot be negative');
            $this->total = $value;
        }
    }
}

PHP 8.4: Asymmetric Visibility

Set properties as publicly readable but only privately writable — without a separate getter:

class User {
    public private(set) string $email;
    public private(set) Carbon $verifiedAt;
}

This is particularly useful in Laravel value objects and DTOs where you want external code to read properties but not mutate them directly.

PHP 8.3: Typed Class Constants

// Before: constants can be any type
const STATUS_ACTIVE = 'active';

// PHP 8.3: typed constants catch mistakes at parse time
const string STATUS_ACTIVE = 'active';
const int    MAX_RETRIES   = 3;

Laravel 11+: Slimmer Application Structure

Laravel 11 introduced a dramatically simplified application skeleton. The app/Http/Kernel.php file is gone — middleware is registered in bootstrap/app.php. The app/Providers/ directory is lean, with only AppServiceProvider.php remaining by default. RouteServiceProvider.php is gone — routes are configured directly in bootstrap/app.php.

For new projects, this is cleaner. For existing projects being upgraded, it is a migration — but the end state is significantly less boilerplate to maintain.

Laravel 11+: Model Casts as Methods

// Old: casts as array property
protected $casts = [
    'settings' => 'array',
    'published_at' => 'datetime',
    'metadata' => AsCollection::class,
];

// Laravel 11: casts as method — IDE-friendly and type-checkable
protected function casts(): array
{
    return [
        'settings'     => 'array',
        'published_at' => 'datetime',
        'metadata'     => AsCollection::class,
        'password'     => Hashed::class, // new in Laravel 11
    ];
}

Laravel 12: Fluent Helpers and First-Class Enum Support

Laravel 12 deepens first-class PHP 8 Enum support. Backed enums work directly in route model binding, Eloquent casts, and validation rules without adapter classes:

// Define once
enum OrderStatus: string
{
    case Pending   = 'pending';
    case Active    = 'active';
    case Cancelled = 'cancelled';
}

// Route model binding by enum value — automatic
Route::get('/orders/{status}', fn(OrderStatus $status) => Order::where('status', $status)->get());

// Eloquent cast
protected function casts(): array
{
    return ['status' => OrderStatus::class];
}

// Validation
$request->validate(['status' => [Rule::enum(OrderStatus::class)]]);

// All of this works without any custom cast or transformer in Laravel 12

Security: What You Are Missing Without Patches

Every month, Laravel ships security fixes. Every month you remain on an EOL version, those fixes do not reach you. Since Laravel 9's EOL in February 2024, there have been multiple CVEs patched in Laravel core and widely-used first-party packages.

Beyond Laravel core, staying on old versions means staying on old dependencies. Your composer.json constraints lock you to old versions of packages that may have known vulnerabilities. On one upgrade project, running composer audit after upgrading from Laravel 9 to Laravel 12 revealed three high-severity vulnerabilities in old dependency versions — vulnerabilities that had patches available but could not be installed without upgrading Laravel first.

# Run this on your project today to see your current exposure
composer audit

The Hiring Problem

Every developer you hire or contract today has been learning Laravel with the current API. Features like Folio (file-based routing), Volt (single-file Livewire components), and the new testing helper APIs are what Laravel developers know and expect in 2025. When your codebase runs Laravel 8, new developers face a learning curve going backwards — unlearning current patterns and relearning deprecated ones. This slows onboarding and creates friction in every pull request.

It also affects recruitment. Senior Laravel developers have opinions about code quality. A codebase on EOL Laravel 9 is a yellow flag in technical interviews that your best candidates will notice and mention.

How to Upgrade Safely

Step 1: Upgrade PHP First

PHP 8.0 → 8.1 → 8.2 → 8.3 → 8.4. Each minor version is a relatively small step. Do not jump from PHP 7.4 directly to 8.4 — do it in two or three stages, running your test suite at each step. The most breaking changes happened between PHP 7.4 and 8.0 (deprecated functions removed, strict type handling changes). 8.1 → 8.4 is comparatively smooth.

Step 2: Use Laravel Shift

Laravel Shift automates most of the upgrade work — updating syntax, moving files, updating config keys, and flagging what it cannot handle automatically. It is not free, but it pays for itself in hours saved on any application larger than a hobby project. I use it on every upgrade I do for clients.

Step 3: Update One Major Version at a Time

Do not jump from Laravel 8 directly to Laravel 12 in one commit. Go 8 → 9 → 10 → 11 → 12 in separate PRs, running your test suite after each step. Each upgrade guide in the Laravel documentation covers the breaking changes for that version — work through them methodically.

Step 4: Upgrade Your Test Coverage First

If your test coverage is below 60%, write tests before upgrading — not after. Tests are your safety net. Without them, you will spend weeks in QA after the upgrade trying to find regressions manually. Prioritise covering your payment flows, authentication, and core business logic.

Step 5: Use a Staging Environment with Production Data

Restore a recent production database backup to staging, run the upgraded application against it, and execute your full regression suite. Schema differences that your unit tests miss will show up when running against real data shapes.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a Laravel upgrade typically take?

For a Laravel 9 → 12 upgrade on a mid-size application (50–100 routes, 30–50 models, 60%+ test coverage): 2–4 weeks. The bulk of the time is dependency updates (some packages do not support newer Laravel versions and need to be replaced), working through deprecation warnings, and verifying business logic in staging. Applications with heavy customisation of framework internals (custom service providers, overridden framework classes) take longer. Applications with good test coverage upgrade faster because regressions are caught automatically.

Will upgrading break my existing code?

Some things will break — that is expected. The Laravel upgrade guide for each version explicitly lists breaking changes. Most are small: a method renamed here, a config key moved there, a deprecated helper removed. The most common breaking changes in recent versions relate to middleware registration (Laravel 11), model casting syntax, and queue serialisation. None of these are architecturally difficult — they are mechanical changes that Laravel Shift handles automatically for most cases.

What is the risk of not upgrading?

The risk compounds over time. In the short term: no security patches, growing dependency conflicts, developers writing new code against an outdated API. At 12–18 months post-EOL: significant dependency drift (many packages drop support for EOL Laravel versions), inability to use new PHP features your team wants, and a codebase that is visibly dated to any developer you interview. At 24+ months: the upgrade itself becomes significantly more painful because the gap between your version and current is larger, and more intermediate versions need to be traversed.