On behalf of the PyPA, I am pleased to announce that the pip team has just released pip 26.0.
This is the first major release of pip for the year 2026. You can read more about our versioning, deprecation policy, and release process here.
Highlights
- Per package pre-release control with the new options
--all-releasesand--only-final, giving you the ability to exclude all pre-release packages using--only-final :all:. - Restrict package selection to distributions uploaded before a given timestamp with the new option
--uploaded-prior-to, e.g.--uploaded-prior-to "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z"will not allow any packages uploaded in 2026. - Install dependencies declared in a script’s inline metadata (PEP 723) using the new option
--requirements-from-script. - Install build dependencies faster with the new optional feature
--use-feature inprocess-build-deps; this will also reduce the number of inconsistencies between regular installs and build dependency installs. - Bump vendored packaging to 26.0, significantly improving performance reading and filtering versions, as well as fixing a long-standing bug where pre-release versions were incorrectly excluded even when only pre-releases satisfied the specifier, e.g.
pip install --uploaded-prior-to 2026-01-26 "sqlalchemy >=2,!=2.0.*"will now always install SQLAlchemy 2.1.0b1
Further Reading
Our dedicated maintainer @ichard26 has put together an excellent in-depth blog post:
And, of course, 26.0 contains additional bug fixes and smaller QoL improvements, please consult our changelog for more information.
Release process
This release was built and published to PyPI using a GitHub workflow and a PyPI Trusted Publisher.
Thanks
As with all pip releases, a significant amount of the work was contributed by pip’s user community. Many thanks to all who have contributed, whether through code, documentation, issue reports and/or discussion. Your help keeps pip improving, and is hugely appreciated.
Regards,
Damian