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Material for MkDocs End of Life

Your options when Material for MkDocs stops being maintained.

Material for MkDocs is in maintenance mode. Its maintainers have announced that it reaches end of life on 2027-05-05, with critical fixes and security updates until then, and version 9.8.0 prints a notice saying so on every build. After that date your site still builds, but bugs and security issues are no longer fixed.

You don't have to decide today, and you don't have to rewrite your site. This page lists the ways forward and who each one suits.

Facts on this page were checked on 2026-11-06; see Sources. Projects change quickly, so check their documentation for the current state. If something here is wrong or out of date, please open an issue.

At a glance

	What changes	Plugins	Maintained after 2027-05-05
Stay on Material 9.8	Nothing	All MkDocs plugins	No
MkDocs NG Material	Two package names	All MkDocs plugins	Yes: security and compatibility fixes
Zensical	The build tool; the `mkdocs.yml` and the look can stay	About 30 popular ones, reimplemented; others are ignored	Yes
MaterialX	The theme package, which adds new features	All MkDocs plugins	Yes, by its author
Sumi	The theme, on MkDocs NG	All MkDocs plugins	Yes

Which one fits

You want the site to stay exactly as it is: MkDocs NG Material. It is Material for MkDocs with the same material theme name and the same configuration, maintained as part of MkDocs NG. You change two lines in your requirements and nothing else.
You're ready to move to a new build tool, and Zensical supports every plugin you use: Zensical, from the team behind Material for MkDocs. It reads mkdocs.yml and keeps the Material look. Check its plugin list first: plugins it doesn't list, and hooks, don't run, and their settings are ignored.
You want new features in a Material-style theme: MaterialX continues Material for MkDocs with features of its own. It depends on ProperDocs and MkDocs 1.6.
You want a lighter theme made for MkDocs NG: Sumi reads most Material settings and content as is. Its migration guide lists what carries over. You can also start with MkDocs NG Material and move to Sumi later.

Keep Material with MkDocs NG

MkDocs NG is a maintained fork of MkDocs 1.x, and MkDocs NG Material (mkdocs-ng-material) is a fork of Material for MkDocs maintained with it.

Same site. The material theme name, mkdocs.yml, overrides/, Markdown and plugins stay as they are.
Maintained after 2027-05-05. Until that date, upstream security and bug fixes are ported as they are released. After it, MkDocs NG Material keeps getting security fixes and compatibility fixes for new versions of MkDocs NG, Python, Python-Markdown and PyMdown Extensions. It adds no new features of its own.
Tested together. Every change to MkDocs NG is tested by building sites with Material for MkDocs and around 30 popular plugins.
Python 3.10 and newer. Material for MkDocs 9.8 requires Python 3.11.

Try it first

To see whether your site builds before you change anything, run it once with uv. It installs everything into a throwaway environment:

uvx --from mkdocs-ng --with mkdocs-ng-material --with-requirements requirements.txt mkdocs build --strict

Point --with-requirements at the file that lists your plugins.

Switch

In your requirements, replace mkdocs with mkdocs-ng and mkdocs-material with mkdocs-ng-material:
```
mkdocs-ng
mkdocs-ng-material
```
If you use the [imaging] or [recommended] extras, keep them: mkdocs-ng-material[imaging].
Install them in the environment you build your site in:
```
pip install -U mkdocs-ng mkdocs-ng-material
```
Build as usual:
```
mkdocs build --strict
```
The end-of-life notice from Material for MkDocs no longer appears.

You don't need to uninstall mkdocs or mkdocs-material. Plugins that depend on them can keep installing them, and MkDocs NG and MkDocs NG Material take precedence. See Switching to MkDocs NG for CI, Poetry, uv and Read the Docs.

Switching back

To go back, put mkdocs and mkdocs-material back in your requirements and reinstall:

pip uninstall mkdocs-ng mkdocs-ng-material
pip install --force-reinstall mkdocs mkdocs-material

Your site needs no changes.

Sources

Material for MkDocs: home page (end-of-life date) and the 9.8.0 release notes.
Zensical: what changed on November 5, 2026 and MkDocs plugin support.
MaterialX: PyPI page (version 10.2.2 and its dependencies).
MkDocs NG Material: documentation and PyPI page.
MkDocs Alternatives Compared compares the build tools.