Canonical announced that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS “Xenial Xerus” has reached the end of its standard Expanded Security Maintenance period under Ubuntu Pro, completing its ten-year support lifecycle.
Released on April 21, 2016, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, powered by Linux kernel 4.15, received five years of standard support followed by Expanded Security Maintenance. With ESM now ended, systems running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (the latest update is 16.04.7) no longer receive regular security updates through standard Ubuntu Pro coverage.
Organizations still relying on Ubuntu 16.04 have two options: migrate to a newer Ubuntu LTS release or activate the Ubuntu Pro Legacy add-on. Upgrades must proceed through each supported LTS version (which means a total of five consecutive upgrades leading up to 26.04 LTS), as direct upgrades from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS are not supported.
The Ubuntu Pro Legacy add-on is a paid extension that provides an additional five years of security maintenance for older LTS releases. For Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, this extends support until April 2031, resulting in a total 15-year lifecycle.
Canonical states that the Legacy add-on provides security maintenance for binary packages in both the main and universe repositories. It also ensures critical patches remain available for widely used components such as MySQL 5.7, Python 2.7, PostgreSQL 9.5, and NGINX 1.10.
Coverage also includes OpenStack Mitaka and key components such as Ceph and Kubernetes, where technically feasible. The add-on is primarily intended for enterprise environments, legacy infrastructure, specialized hardware, and proprietary software stacks that cannot be quickly migrated to a newer Ubuntu base.
Finally, Canonical warns that after April 2026, running Ubuntu 16.04 without the Legacy add-on will leave systems without security updates.
For more details, see the announcement.
