What's new in Umbraco 18?

And It's a Refinement, Not a Reinvention..

Released June 2026, Umbraco 18 brings Elements and a new Library section for reusable content, typed Delivery API schemas, and a steady layer of polish. Here's what's new and the honest answer to whether you should upgrade from 17 LTS.

Umbraco 18 at a Glance

Umbraco 18 officially arrived on 25 June 2026, and if you are expecting a dramatic platform overhaul, adjust your expectations in the best possible way: this is a refinement release. It has the familiar Umbraco shape one headline feature arriving in its first stage, a handful of focused improvements, and a steady stream of polish underneath. For enterprises, that's often exactly what you want: meaningful progress without the upheaval of a reinvention.

The headline is Elements, a new way to manage reusable content that lives outside the traditional page tree, housed in a brand-new Library section of the back office. Alongside it, the Delivery API gains typed Open API schemas, and there's a layer of performance, editing, accessibility, and maintainability work beneath the surface. The v18.0.0 release shipped with 176 fixes and feature additions in total, and has already seen patch releases since.

But the most important thing to understand about Umbraco 18 isn't a feature, it's the release's status, because that's what determines whether you should care right now. Let's start there.

First, the Context: 18 Is STS, 17 Is LTS

This is the single most important point for any enterprise, so we'll lead with it plainly. Umbraco 18 is a non-LTS (short-term support) major release. Umbraco 17 remains the current Long-Term Support version. That distinction drives everything about your upgrade decision.

Umbraco's release model works like this: a major version gets an Active phase (its first six months, with minor releases roughly every six weeks), then a Support phase, then a Security phase, before reaching end of life. For a normal (STS) major like 18, that adds up to roughly a year of support. For an LTS major like 17, the support and security phases are far longer 17 is built on .NET 10 LTS and is supported into late 2028. A new Umbraco LTS arrives shortly after each new .NET LTS, so the next LTS will align with the next .NET LTS rather than with 18.

What this means in practice: Umbraco 18 is optional. As Umbraco itself puts it, if 17 is already the right home for your project, you can happily stay there. Adopting 18 means either riding the roughly-six-weekly STS release train and upgrading again when the next version lands, or moving off 18 before its shorter support window closes. That's a perfectly reasonable choice for teams who want the newest features and keep up with releases but it's a genuine commitment, not a free lunch. We will come back to this decision in detail in §10, because it's the crux of the whole thing.

The Headline: Elements and the New Library Section

Now the feature everyone's talking about. Umbraco 18 introduces a new Library section in the back office, and the first thing to live there is Elements, a proper, first-class way to manage reusable content that isn't a page.

If you've built Umbraco sites for any length of time, you've almost certainly solved this problem yourself already. To handle reusable content a promotional teaser, a repeated call-to-action, footer data, site-wide settings, a snippet that appears in ten places teams have long created a "library" or "global" node in the content tree and tucked template-less document types inside it. It works, but those items were never meant to be routable, never meant to have a template, and never really meant to sit in the content tree at all. It was a workaround, reinvented project after project. Umbraco 18 turns that workaround into a feature.

Elements are the first non-routable content type to live in the new Library, and they come with the full management you'd expect: create, delete, move, and publish, with the same permissions and rollback you already rely on elsewhere in the CMS. To use an Element on a page, there's a new Element Picker you pick the Element you need on whatever piece of content requires it. It's a clean, purpose-built home for the content that never belonged in your page tree, and for agencies and enterprises who've been hand-rolling this pattern for years, it's a genuinely satisfying "finally" moment.

Why Elements Matters for Enterprises

Beyond the developer satisfaction, Elements has real operational value for larger organizations, and it's worth spelling out who benefits and how.

Editors spend less time hunting through page structures for content that isn't really a page the footer block, the reusable promo, the shared disclaimer now live in one obvious place. Marketing teams gain cleaner control over reusable content, so a change to a shared call-to-action happens once, in one place, rather than being chased across the site. Developers benefit from a cleaner content architecture, without the template-less-node workaround cluttering the tree. And enterprises running complex digital estates especially multisite setups can manage shared content far more efficiently across multiple sites and experiences.

In short, Elements addresses a genuine content-governance pain that grows with the size of your estate. The bigger and more complex your Umbraco footprint, the more the old workaround hurt, and the more this tidier model helps. It's a quietly significant improvement to how reusable content is owned and maintained which, for a large content operation, is exactly the kind of thing that compounds over time.

It's Phase One What's Coming in Umbraco 19

Here's an honest and important caveat: what shipped in 18 is Phase One of a larger feature, and knowing what's *not* yet included matters for your planning.

The current release gives you the Library section, Elements as reusable content, full management, and the Element Picker. What it doesn't yet give you is the deeper Block Editor integration the ability to mix and match Elements alongside standalone blocks in the Block Editor, to convert existing blocks into reusable library Elements, and to customize Elements per page. That bigger payoff is targeted for Umbraco 19, expected later in 2026.

Why does this matter? Because if the specific capability you're excited about is the Block Editor integration, it isn't here yet — and that might affect whether you adopt 18 now or wait. If, on the other hand, a clean home for reusable content solves a real problem for you today, Phase One delivers that immediately. Being clear about the roadmap stage prevents the disappointment of upgrading for a capability that's still one release away.

Typed Open API Schemas for the Delivery API

The second notable feature is aimed squarely at developers building headless and API-driven solutions. Umbraco 18's Delivery API now has an opt-in option to generate typed Open API schemas for each Document Type, Element Type, and Media Type in your project.

Enable it via configuration, and the generated Open API document will include dedicated schemas for each content type, expressed as a discriminated union keyed on the content type. The practical benefit is better tooling: if you generate typed API clients from the Open API document, you now get strongly-typed models per content type rather than generic ones, which improves the developer experience and reduces a class of integration errors on the consuming side.

honest caveat worth stating clearly, because Umbraco states it themselves: this only changes the Open API document, not the Delivery API responses. The actual JSON the API returns is unchanged. So if you consume the Delivery API directly, without generating typed clients, there's nothing here for you. The win is specifically for teams using the Open API document to generate typed clients or drive tooling for them, it's a meaningful quality-of-life improvement. (Under the hood, Open API generation also moved to Microsoft's own "Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi", which is a breaking change to be aware of.)

Performance and Back-Office Polish

Every Umbraco release carries a layer of quieter improvements, and 18 is no exception several of them focused on back-office performance, which editors feel every day. Notable work includes fixing a performance bottleneck when a Tiptap rich-text editor appears on a document, embedding package manifests to reduce the number of start-up requests, and coalescing JavaScript chunks around the back office to cut the number of network requests it makes. The net effect is a snappier, leaner back office, particularly on larger sites.

Alongside performance, 18 continues the evolution of the content editing experience and brings improvements to accessibility and general platform maintainability. None of these are headline-grabbing on their own, but collectively they're the kind of steady polish that keeps a platform pleasant to use and cheaper to maintain and they're part of why staying reasonably current pays off even when no single feature is a must-have.

Under the Hood: Breaking Changes and Cleanup

For developers planning an upgrade, this is the section that matters most: Umbraco 18 includes a meaningful round of cleanup, with 36 breaking changes in the release. Much of this is deliberate removal of obsolete code that had been marked for deletion for example, the legacy "UmbracoApiController" and front-end API auto-routing, an obsolete "UrlSegment" extension method, legacy logging and permissions-table code, and some deprecated service methods.

This is healthy shedding long-deprecated code keeps the platform lean and maintainable but it does mean an upgrade to 18 is not entirely free of code changes if your solution relied on any of the removed APIs. This is exactly the kind of thing a proper upgrade assessment surfaces: an inventory of where your custom code touches anything that changed, so the upgrade is scoped rather than surprising. For most well-maintained solutions the impact is modest, but "modest" is not "zero," and knowing precisely where you stand before you start is what keeps an upgrade calm.

Beyond the CMS: The Wider Platform

Umbraco 18 is a CMS release, but it lands within a broader platform that's been moving quickly, and a few adjacent updates are worth knowing about. Umbraco Deploy 18 received a significant back-office UI/UX overhaul a redesigned transfer, queue, restore, compare, and export experience and, importantly, it now supports transferring, restoring, importing, and exporting Elements, so the new Library content moves cleanly across environments. Deploy 18 also migrates certain legacy structures (single-item Nested Content and single-block Block List configurations) to a new single-block editor at import time, and improves support for load-balanced back-office instances.

More broadly, this is the same platform generation where AI in Umbraco matured to production (with the Umbraco.AI packages aligning to the 17/18 version line), where Umbraco Automate launched as an open-source automation product, and where Umbraco Cloud gained load balancing and Compose advanced the composable data story. If you want the full platform picture rather than just the CMS, our Codegarden 2026 wrap covers where the whole ecosystem is heading and our guide to whether Umbraco is the right CMS for AI in 2026 goes deep on the AI side.

Should You Upgrade to 18? An Honest Decision Guide

This is the question that actually matters, and the honest answer is: it depends on what you value, and both choices are legitimate.

Consider moving to Umbraco 18 if: the Elements/Library feature solves a real, present pain for your content team; you keep up with releases and are comfortable with the STS cadence (upgrading again roughly every six weeks for minors, and to the next major when it lands); you're building something new where starting on the latest makes sense; or you want the typed Delivery API schemas for your headless tooling. For teams that stay current by habit, 18 is a smooth, low-drama step from 17.

Consider staying on Umbraco 17 LTS if: stability and a long support runway matter more to you than having the newest features immediately; you'd rather not commit to the shorter STS support window and its upgrade cadence; the Elements capability you most want is the Block Editor integration still coming in 19; or you simply don't have a pressing reason to move. Umbraco 17 is the current LTS, supported into late 2028, and staying on it is a perfectly sound enterprise decision not a sign of falling behind.

The key is that this is a deliberate choice, not a default. The worst outcome is upgrading to an STS release without realizing its support implications, or staying on an old version because no one made a conscious decision. If you're unsure which fits your risk profile, roadmap, and team capacity, that's precisely the kind of question a short advisory conversation resolves.

How the Upgrade Works

If you decide 18 is right for you, the good news is that moving from 17 to 18 is a routine, same-generation upgrade both are on .NET 10, so there's no runtime jump involved. The core CMS handles the version-to-version migration, and the practical work is checking your solution against the 36 breaking changes, testing your custom code and integrations, and validating on a staging environment before you go live.

The disciplined approach is the same one that keeps any Umbraco upgrade calm: start with a quick assessment of where your custom code touches anything that changed, upgrade and test on a parallel environment while your live site runs untouched, verify functionality and performance, then deploy. For most well-maintained 17 solutions this is a modest, predictable project rather than a heavy one. The heavier upgrade conversations are for teams coming from much older versions which is a different situation entirely.

Conclusion

Umbraco 18 (released 25 June 2026) is a refinement release headlined by Elements and the new Library section a proper home for reusable content plus typed Delivery API schemas and a layer of performance and maintainability polish. Umbraco continues its steady, sensible evolution no drama, real progress. The right move for *you* depends on your version, your roadmap, and your risk profile, which is exactly the kind of decision worth making deliberately.

Plan Your Umbraco Version Strategy

Giriraj Digital is an Umbraco Gold Partner, home to two of the world's ~50 Umbraco MVPs and a team of Certified Masters. We help organizations make the right version decisions 17 LTS or 18, upgrade now or later, stay or move and execute them cleanly.

We can help you with Umbraco version strategy and advisory, upgrades (including 17 to 18 and older versions to 17 LTS), Umbraco development, headless and Delivery API work, Umbraco.AI implementation, migration, and support starting with a free Umbraco site audit or a version-strategy call: an honest assessment of where you stand, your breaking-change exposure, and the right path for your roadmap and risk profile.

Weighing Umbraco 17 vs 18, or planning an upgrade? Talk to us for an honest, MVP-backed recommendation including staying put if that's the right call.