WordPress 6.6, scheduled for release in July 2024, will remove support for PHP 7.0 and 7.1. The new minimum supported PHP version will be 7.2.24. The new minimum supported PHP version will be 7.2.24. The recommended PHP version is still 7.4 or higher.

WordPress currently supports PHP 7.0 or higher. The minimum supported version was last adjusted in WordPress 6.3 in August 2023, and since then, as of April 2024, the use of PHP 7.0 and 7.1 has dropped to 2.45% of monitored WordPress installations.

There is no specific percentage of usage that requires a PHP version to be lower than WordPress support, but historically project maintainers have used 5% as a benchmark. The combined usage of PHP 7.0 and 7.1 is now well below 2.45%, so the process of adding a minimum supported PHP version to this release can continue.

Over time, the benefits of adding a minimum supported version of PHP will manifest themselves in a number of places, including in the plugin and theme ecosystem, in the long-term perception of the WordPress project, in developer relationships, and over time in the WordPress codebase and its developer tools.