Laravel 13.18.0
Laravel 13.18.0 has been released on June 30, 2026 — a minor update that ships with a handful of new features, important fixes, and continued refinements to the developer command system.
Upgrade: Dev Command Upgrades
Priority-based registration has been added to dev commands, giving developers more control over startup ordering. The artisan dev command now uses --kill-others-on-fail by default, so a failing dev dependency cleanly stops all associated processes rather than leaving orphans behind. The schedule:work command now properly catches signals, making it more reliable in long-running environments.
Bug Bashes
Several bugs were squashed in this release. The cache headers are now correctly set on HEAD requests — a subtle issue that could affect API responses. The RateLimited middleware no longer fails to serialize releaseAfter in __sleep(), fixing a potential queue serialization problem.
The Number::forHumans() and Number::abbreviate() helpers were crashing on INF and NAN inputs — now handled gracefully. Same fix applied to Number::fileSize(). JSON parsing for top-level zero bodies was also fixed, resolving an edge case where empty request bodies could trigger parse errors.
A flexible() lock and defer label collision in TaggedCache has been resolved, and the restored event is now prevented when a soft delete restore fails — no more false-positive restoration notifications.
Performance Push
Cache hits when using debounced jobs have been further reduced thanks to smarter deduplication logic. The WorkerStopping event now exposes the jobs processed count and the timestamp of the last processed job, giving operators better visibility into worker lifecycle.
Additionally, lastJobProcessedAt is correctly set to null when nothing was processed, preventing misleading metrics in monitoring dashboards.
Type System Improvements
This release adds conditional return types to several methods and syncs getter return types with their property generics. These improvements mean better IDE autocompletion and stricter static analysis — a welcome quality-of-life boost for teams using PHPStan or Psalm.
Laravel 13.18.0 is available now. Update your projects with composer update and check the release notes on GitHub for the full changelog.