• Branch Cut / Feature Freeze: 17th of April, 2025
• Code Freeze / Release Candidate: 30th of April, 2025
• Release Date: scheduled 8th of May, 2025

• Daniel Hawton - Solo.io (dhawton)
• Faseela K - Ericsson (kfaseela)
• Gustavo Meira - Microsoft (grnmeira)

On the 17th of April, the primary RM will create the release-1.26 branch, based on master. Any changes on master before this date will be included in the release. Any changes after will have to be cherry picked.

To get a PR merged into the release branch, it must first be merged into the master branch. PRs can automatically be cherrypicked by typing by adding the cherrypick/release-1.26 label to the PR.

A PR on the release branch will only be approved if:

• The change is already on master.
  • exception: if a change only applies to the release branch, and should not go to master, a change can be submitted directly to the release branch, but please note this in the PR description.
• The change is a bug fix, documentation enhancement, or testing enhancement.
  • Changes that are risky may require a feature flag, especially after the 1.25.0 release.
  • Any change not meeting the above, such as a new feature or API, may require TOC approval.

Note: on the istio.io repo, changes should go directly to master until after the 1.26 launch. The changes will appear on preliminary istio.io.