Status of Bazel 9.0.0

• Expected first release candidate date: 2025-11-03
• Expected final release candidate date: 2026-01-15
• Expected release date: 2026-01-20
• List of release blockers

To report a release-blocking bug, please add a comment with the text @bazel-io flag 9.0.0 to the issue. A release manager will triage it and add it to the milestone.

To cherry-pick a mainline commit into 9.0.0, simply send a PR against the release-9.0.0 branch.

Task list:

• Pick release baseline: 72afe97
• Create release candidate: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/releases/tag/9.0.0rc1
• Check downstream projects
• Create draft release announcement
• Send the release announcement PR for review
• Push the release and notify package maintainers
• Update the documentation
• Push the blog post
• Update the release page