Node.js 20 End of Life: Migration Playbook for April 30, 2026

Node.js 20 reaches end of life on April 30, 2026. If you are reading this in March or April, you are already behind. Node.js EOL dates do not come with a grace period. On May 1st, no more security patches. No more CVE fixes. The npm ecosystem moves on, and packages start dropping support in their CI matrices before the EOL date even arrives. I have seen teams discover they are running an EOL runtime at the worst possible moment -- during a security incident, when the fix only ships for supported versions. This playbook covers what Node 20 EOL means, which version to move to, what breaks along the way, and the exact steps to migrate without a production outage. TL;DR -- What to do and when Right now (February): Audit every service, container, Lambda function, and CI pipeline running Node 20. Run your test suite on Node 22. March: Migrate production workloads to Node 22 LTS (recommended) or Node 24 if you need the latest features. Deploy behind canary or feature flags. Early April: Clean