What year did Python 2 reach end-of-life?

Python 2 reached end-of-life in 2020, with official support ending on January 1 of that year.

The retirement ended nearly two decades of Python 2 development. Python 2.0 had been released in 2000, while Python 3.0 arrived in 2008 with major language changes that made a clean break necessary. Because many users and projects needed time to migrate, the originally planned Python 2 sunset was extended from 2015 to 2020.

Python 2.7 was the final release line, and the core development community stopped providing bug fixes, security updates, and other changes on the announced EOL date. Python 2.7.18 was released later, in April 2020, but it contained a final bundle of already-frozen fixes and did not extend official support.

The date is sometimes confused with later dates because operating-system vendors, commercial support providers, and individual projects maintained Python 2 compatibility for different periods. Those downstream arrangements did not change Python’s official end-of-life date. Python 3 became the supported path for new language improvements and security maintenance.