Node.js 26 enters LTS: Temporal by default, V8 14.6, AWS Lambda preview live

Node.js 26 — released May 2026, moved to long-term support this October — is the runtime’s pivotal release of the year: Temporal by default, V8 14.6 and Undici 8.0 landed together, with AWS’s Lambda preview runtimes following within weeks.

Key points

• Node.js 26 shipped as Current on May 5, 2026 and entered long-term support in October, per the even-numbered-line convention; the release line has moved to v26.13.0.
• The Temporal API is enabled by default, officially positioned as the replacement for the legacy Date; V8 is at 14.6 (Chromium 146), bringing Upsert and Iterator.concat.
• Undici, the HTTP client, is at 8.0.2; crypto deprecations such as DEP0182 have reached end-of-life.
• AWS Lambda’s public preview runtimes start with Node.js 26 and Python 3.15; the Hacker News thread “Now with Temporal” reached 151 points.

Node.js 26 has entered long-term support on the usual even-numbered schedule. The May 5, 2026 release announcement for 26.0.0 promised this path when it shipped as Current: after a six-month evaluation window, production teams can now treat 26 as their default target line, and the release train has already advanced to v26.13.0 in late October. AWS announced in late October that its Lambda public preview runtimes start with Node.js 26 alongside Python 3.15 — faster cloud-side follow-through than the last few generations.

Temporal by default

The first highlight of the 26.0.0 announcement is the Temporal API, enabled by default. Temporal is the modern date-time API TC39 has polished for years — time zones, calendars and durations are first-class citizens — and the community has waited nearly a decade for it to land; the 151-point Hacker News thread was titled “Now with Temporal” for a reason. The practical effect on application code: new code no longer needs to touch Date’s zero-indexed months and ambiguous time-zone semantics, and the announcement explicitly positions Temporal as the replacement for the legacy object.

V8 14.6 and Undici 8

V8 moves to 14.6.202.33 (from Chromium 146), bringing two groups of new language capability: Upsert methods for Map/Set (getOrInsert and getOrInsertComputed) and iterator sequencing (Iterator.concat). Undici, the HTTP client, moves to 8.0.2. Cleanup happened in the same pass: crypto deprecations such as DEP0182 have reached end-of-life — worth scanning your deprecation warnings before upgrading. For teams still on 18 or 20, that cleanup is the real cost of the upgrade: dependencies that ignored deprecation warnings for years go from warnings to hard errors across a major line. The announcement lists every SEMVER-MAJOR change, and a staging pass with node --trace-deprecation is far cheaper than a production fire drill.

Cloud follow-through and upgrade advice

AWS Lambda’s public preview runtimes pair Node.js 26 with Python 3.15, letting serverless teams validate compatibility before GA — and the preview window is exactly when the CI version matrix should grow a 26 column. For everyone else, 26 entering LTS opens the formal migration window from 18/20/22: run node --trace-deprecation against the crypto removals first, then evaluate how much hand-rolled time-zone code Temporal can replace. Temporal’s immutable objects and constructor-level time zones turn the old store-UTC-convert-on-display convention into a language-level feature. Python 3.15 sits in the same Lambda preview list, so the two migrations can be scheduled together.

Summary

Node.js 26 entering LTS is one of the most consequential server-side JavaScript events of the year: Temporal ends Date’s decades-long monopoly, and V8 14.6 with Undici 8 pulls the runtime level with the browser. The upgrade cost concentrates in deprecation cleanup; the payoff starts on day one of a new project. Every figure and feature here is sourced from the official nodejs.org release announcement and AWS’s blog, with the HN thread as community witness. Your next new service should default to 26.