Airflow 2 reached end of life in April 2026: what the move to Airflow 3 actually breaks

Airflow's own version table is unambiguous: Airflow 2 entered limited maintenance on 22 October 2025 and reached end of life on 22 April 2026 [1]. End-of-life versions get no fixes or support [1]. Airflow 3, first released on 22 April 2025, is the current line [1][2]; its own limited-maintenance and end-of-life dates were still listed as TBD at the 31 October 2026 check [1]. The last 2.x line is 2.11 [1].

Before you start

• Be on Airflow 2.7 or later; the project recommends moving to the latest 2.x first, then to Airflow 3 [3].
• Run the Ruff AIR rules (Ruff 0.13.1 or later) over your DAGs to flag incompatibilities, and use airflow config update --fix to migrate configuration [3].

What breaks

• Direct database access from tasks. Task code can no longer import and use Airflow database sessions or models; workers talk to the API server instead of the database [3]. Custom operators and tasks that query the metadata database are the most common blocker.
• SubDAGs are removed, replaced by TaskGroups, Assets and data-aware scheduling [3].
• SLAs are removed, replaced by Deadline Alerts [3].
• The Sequential Executor is removed in favour of the LocalExecutor [3].
• Context variables including execution_date and yesterday_ds are no longer available [3].

What Airflow 3 gives back

DAG versioning, a rewritten UI, backfills run inside the scheduler, event-driven scheduling on data assets, and the Task Execution Interface that moves Airflow towards a client-server architecture [2].

What we ask

We ask Airflow engineers how they would find every task that touches the metadata database before an Airflow 3 upgrade, and what they would replace each pattern with. The answer separates people who have done the migration from people who have read the release notes.