Red Hat will support your RHEL forever now - for a price

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Once upon a time, and it wasn't that long ago, enterprise Linux distributors offered 3 to 5 years of support. Then, starting in the 2020s, Red Hat , SUSE , and Canonical , the top Linux companies, started offering up to a decade or more of support. Now, Red Hat is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Long-Life Add-On , aka "RHEL Forever." It does exactly what it says: it offers support for any particular version of RHEL so long as you're willing to pay the bill.

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RHEL Forever isn't for everyone. Red Hat is pitching the new offering as a way to align software lifecycles with the multi‑decade horizons common in highly regulated and capital‑intensive industries, such as finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and government. That said, many companies are extremely reluctant to upgrade their servers, which is one reason why the long-out-of-support CentOS still has many users. I expect many of these businesses will be more than willing to pay for this new subscription level.

This new offering comes only months after Red Hat introduced the RHEL 14‑year Extended Life Cycle, Long-Life Add-On at the 2026 Red Hat Summit . It seems this wasn't long enough for some customers, so the RHEL Forever, which sits on top of the company's existing RHEL Premium subscription , will now let you run RHEL for forever and a day.

Positioned as the "ultimate tier" of the RHEL lifecycle, RHEL Forever offers customers a continuous annual renewal path to keep a specific RHEL release running with vendor support as long as they are willing to pay for it.

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By decoupling support from the calendar, Red Hat argues that RHEL Forever enables IT teams to synchronize modernization with business milestones rather than vendor end‑of‑life dates. The company says this can reduce operational friction by eliminating repeated large‑scale migrations solely triggered by lifecycle deadlines.

The Long-Life Add-On is available for any specific RHEL release, but requires an active Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extended Life Cycle, Premium subscription as a prerequisite. RHEL Forever is sold as a yearly extension.

Under the new tier, Red Hat will deliver critical security patches for vulnerabilities rated Critical by Red Hat Product Security, selected urgent bug fixes, and 24x7 technical support. As with previous long‑tail offerings, fixes are backported to preserve API/ABI stability rather than introducing disruptive upgrades.