Red Hat has introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extended Life Cycle Premium, a stand-alone subscription that extends support for a major RHEL release to 14 years. This offering is designed for organizations with long-term environments where upgrades are limited by certification, hardware dependencies, or strict operational requirements.
The new offering adds four years to Red Hat’s standard 10-year lifecycle for a major RHEL version. It also provides six years of extended maintenance for even-numbered minor releases, allowing customers to remain on a fixed platform version without following the typical upgrade schedule.
According to Red Hat, the subscription covers the final minor release of a major RHEL version and includes security fixes for Critical, Important, and Moderate CVEs with a CVSS score of 7 or higher, as well as urgent and selected high-priority bug fixes where applicable. It also aligns with RHEL Premium support, offering 24×7 assistance for Severity 1 and 2 cases.
This positions the new RHEL offering alongside Ubuntu’s enterprise support model. Last year, Canonical expanded Ubuntu Pro coverage to 15 years with its Legacy add-on, surpassing the previous 12-year model. However, the two models differ in structure.
Canonical combines standard maintenance, Expanded Security Maintenance, and the Legacy add-on for extended coverage, while Red Hat emphasizes a 14-year lifecycle for a major RHEL branch and six years of support for even-numbered minor releases.
In other words, Ubuntu currently offers the longest published support duration, but Red Hat is focusing on customers who require long-term stability for a specific enterprise platform branch under a defined lifecycle policy. For organizations in heavily regulated environments, this distinction may be more important than the one-year difference in support duration.
For more details on the new Red Hat offering, see the official announcement.
After what they did to CentOS, I will never trust Red Hat.