As long as most of us can remember, ServiceNow released their major versions twice per year. One release in March and one in September. This is about to change.
Although it is recommended to upgrade to every version to utilize the latest functionality, a lot of customers only upgrade once a year (to stay compliant). This meant they had until May/November to get their instances to that release before running out of support (and ServiceNow upgraded them no matter what).
Starting the Australia release (Q2'26) the major release dates moves to April and October (releases from before Zurich will get an extra month of patching to cover the extra month).
There is no reason given for this (yet) but it does mean that the final date you need to be upgraded to a supported version also moves up a month. June and December will now be the months that you have to have finished your upgrade, or you run out of support and ServiceNow will upgrade for you.
It's only a month. But please take that month into consideration when you start planning your upgrades for next year. I have several clients that upgrade in Q4 and always hope to finish in October, because November is already too close to December with all the Holidays and end of year processes that have to run. Can you imagine what happens if they now have to upgrade in November, hoping it is finished before December?
At this moment, we are working with the clients upgrading to Zurich, to also upgrade to Australia so their upgrade cycle moves from Q4 to Q2 and they will skip Brazil when it comes out in October '26.
It's only a month, but a month can make a huge difference.
Official doc: KB0598977 (point 5)
