Roadmap

Disclaimer

This roadmap is intended to provide guidance and does not constitute a contractual commitment. Items that do not make it into a specific version will be shifted to subsequent releases. Priorities may be adjusted or items deprioritized as needed. To ensure compatibility with upcoming changes, we recommend running your tests against the main branch, which remains functional and up-to-date. Additionally, most minor releases are preceded by a release candidate, available two weeks before, which can also be used for testing purposes.

Legend

Priority:
‼️ This item is very important for this release.
❗ Would be great if this item makes it in.
❣️ This is a nice-to-have.

Status:
⏸️ Not yet started.
▶️ On track. On the right path to make it into the release.
⚠️ At risk. There’s a chance this might need to be bumped to the next release.
✅ Done or practically done.

Long-term Releases

Qiskit 2.3

• Add C FFI for building custom transpiler passes
• Work on improving runtime efficiency of transpiler
• Support for synthesis floor planning of abstract blocks

Qiskit 2.2

• Expand C FFI to include:
  • Nested gate definitions
  • Individual transpiler passes
• Work on improving runtime efficiency of transpiler
• Improved infrastructure for context aware synthesis
• Compilation of circuits + observables

Qiskit 2.1

🏁 2.1.0 milestone

• Expand C FFI to include:
  • Circuit construction with standard gates
  • Target representation
  • Transpiler function (to compile circuits for target)
  • ▶️ Migrate the remaining core data model for circuits to Rust
  • ❗▶️ Rust parameter expressions
• Expand the target to better support next generation of quantum hardware
• Better layout/routing algorithms for modular hardware with high error links
• OpenQASM exporters in Rust:
  • QASM3
  • QASM2
• QPY support in Rust
• Support annotation in boxes

Qiskit 2.0

🏁 2.0.0 milestone

• ‼️ Initial support to build Qiskit C FFI as a standalone dynamic library
  • ‼️✅ Sparse Observable C API
• ‼️✅ Add structures to support deferred timing of dynamic circuits
  • Add QASM3 stretch operation
  • Initial support for stretch operations
• ‼️✅ Initial support for boxes in circuits
• ❣️✅ Improvements in synthesis with fractional gates
• ‼️✅ Removal of deprecated code in 1.*

Qiskit 1.4

Important

Qiskit 1.4 is the last minor release of 1.* and will stop having bug-fix support not earlier than 6-months after the release of Qiskit 2.0 (around Aug 2025). 1.4 is the transitional release. Therefore, if no deprecation warnings are raised in 1.4, you are probably ready to move to 2.0.

🏁 1.4.0 milestone

• No significant new features
• Minimal deprecation warnings for 2.0 removals and API changes
• QuantumCircuit.estimate_duration() to compute the estimated duration of a scheduled circuit and replace the deprecated QuantumCircuit.duration attribute.
• The PendingDeprecationWarnings in the circuit library are promoted to DeprecationWarnings

Qiskit 1.3

Important

Qiskit 1.3.0 (released on Nov 28, 2024) is the latest stable version of Qiskit.

• Most transpiler passes in Rust
• Oxidized synthesis library
• Circuit library generators in Rust

Show unmaintained releases

---

These Qiskit versions are unmaintained. This means that if a bug or issue is found in these versions, they will not be updated, and the recommended action is to upgrade to a maintained version.

---

Qiskit 1.2

Qiskit 1.2 (released on Aug 15, 2024) was superseded by Qiskit 1.3 (released on Nov 28, 2024), which is fully backward-compatible. Moving to the latest Qiskit 1.* version is highly encouraged.

• Rust representation of Quantum Circuits
• 10x faster circuit construction with standard gates
• Oxidized synthesis functions
• Improvements to transpiler quality for optimization and layout

Qiskit 0.46

Qiskit 0.46.3 is the last 0.* and reached end-of-life on Sep 27, 2024. Qiskit 0.* is now not supported and moving to a higher version is highly encouraged. In the same direction, qiskit-terra has no updates since then.