Dear RIOTers,
as we approach the end of the year (and hopefully some well-deserved holiday hacking time 
), it’s time to look ahead to our first release of 2026. Here are the proposed dates for the 2026.01 cycle:
- 2026-01-04T23:00:00Z: soft feature freeze, for high-impact features
- 2026-01-14T23:00:00Z: hard feature freeze, for all features
- 2026-01-25T23:00:00Z: Release date
If you have features that are nearly ready and you would love to see in 2026.01, please comment here. Don’t forget to label your PRs! It helps keep things running smoothly 
Cheers, and happy hacking!
Leandro
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Dear RIOTers,
we’re starting now the soft feature freeze for our upcoming 2026.01 release! 
You’re kindly asked to refrain from merging high-impact features until the hard feature freeze is in effect. Thanks!
Cheers,
Leandro
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Dear RIOTers,
The 2026.01 release branch has been created, so we are now officially in feature freeze. This means that from now only bugfixes will be backported to the 2026.01-branch. If anyone has any bugfixes or documentation improvements that they feel should be part of this release please let me know.
New features can still be merged into the master branch during this period, but they will not be part of 2026.01 release.
The test tracking issue of release candidate 1 is already there. As usual, help with testing and resources for the testing is as always very welcome 
Most of the testing is automated, but some stuff still needs to be run manually. So if you want to help, please put your name after the corresponding item in the linked issue to streamline the testing efforts.
Thanks everyone for the great work and contributions!
Cheers,
Leandro