The PHP Foundation
The PHP Foundation
PHP turned 30 in 2025. With The PHP Foundation's support, the PHP project marked the year by shipping PHP 8.5. The PHP Foundation also launched PIE 1.0, initiated a project to modernize PHP's stream layer, and authored roughly 42% of all commits to PHP's core. This work was supported by 536 sponsors and individual contributors, and it could not have happened without them.
At the end of 2025, The PHP Foundation consisted of 8 volunteer board members, an Executive Director sponsored by JetBrains, and 11 contracted developers who worked part- and full-time to strengthen and improve the core PHP language through bug and security fixes, feature development, and contributing to the RFC process through discussion and development of new RFCs.
The total contributions received from sponsors and individual donors was $730,534, which enabled The PHP Foundation to advance its mission in a meaningful way.
The PHP Foundation's main focus is to ensure the sustainability and long term viability of the PHP language. Our priorities continue to be:
It should be noted that The PHP Foundation does not control the decisions made by the PHP community regarding the language, nor does it assume any governance over the language itself. PHP has always been, and will continue to be a community-owned Open Source project.
Leadership at The PHP Foundation coordinated several high-level initiatives, including:
In addition, in 2025, eleven Foundation-funded contractors collectively logged thousands of hours advancing PHP's language, runtime, security posture, ecosystem tooling, and community reach.
Key achievements included:
Our 2025 team was stable and productive, and worked very well together. We ended 2025 by adding one more contractor to the team in H2: Joe Watkins.
Therefore, as of January 1, 2026, 11 Foundation developers work on PHP:
We acknowledge the limitations in providing any metrics; very rarely do metrics accurately represent the full scenario (for instance, a 1-line commit and a 100-line commit are counted equally in the overall number of commits). Additionally, some metrics are more difficult to capture than others. Therefore, we offer this set of obtainable metrics to collectively demonstrate the team's impact. To clarify the data points above:
Jakub Zelenka led sustained multi-month investigations on multiple security advisories, which included the handling of PHP security releases. Jakub also represented the PHP Foundation in the OpenSSF working group shaping EU Cyber Resilience Act compliance. David Carlier delivered a steady stream of overflow, double-free, and memory leak fixes across GD, ZIP, intl, PDO_SQLite, sodium, and Fiber, upstreaming several directly to libgd. Shivam Mathur is responsible for security upgrades to Windows PHP builds addressing 50+ CVEs/security issues, and continues to support builds for 100+ extensions for Windows. Derick Rethans patched an XSS in php.net and ran an emergency CVE response for the rsync server.
The STF underwrote a 530-hour modernization of PHP's stream layer, delivering a new Polling API, TLS 1.3 improvements with session resumption (PSK, tickets, early data), redesigned stream error handling, an io_uring/IOCP abstraction, modernized copy infrastructure (copy_file_range, splice, sendfile), filter seeking improvements, and socket option enhancements. This is an ongoing project and will see more progress in 2026.
The PHP Foundation has demonstrated meaningful contributions in several areas:
Joe Watkins joined in H2 and published ORT, a PHP tensor library with backends for SSE2/SSE4.1/AVX2/AVX512, NEON, CUDA, RISC-V64, and WebAssembly (including a custom IEEE 754-2008 float16 implementation in C) reaching 97% test coverage and positioning PHP to participate in AI/ML workloads. Arnaud explored generational and Boehm GC, plus Modules and Snapshots PoCs.
Beyond headline projects, the team spent a large percentage of their time carrying PHP's day-to-day weight: continuous bug triage (Ilija's largest recurring line item every month), monthly release management across 8.3.x and 8.4.x, cross-platform fixes spanning Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Haiku, French (David) and Japanese (Saki) documentation contributions, mailing list moderation, and dozens of code reviews monthly across virtually every PHP subsystem. Additionally, the team spent time on maintenance and stable releases of external extensions including imagick and GnuPG, and tools like PHP-FPM that are part of PHP core.
The following list covers RFCs authored or co-authored by PHP Foundation contractors in 2025, along with their RFCs that changed status in 2025.
| RFC | Author | Status |
| URL Parsing API (ext/uri) | Máté Kocsis | Implemented in PHP 8.5 |
| PHP 8.5 Deprecations | Gina P. Banyard, Christoph M. Becker*, Daniel Scherzer*, Tim Düsterhus*, Theodore Brown*, Jorg Sowa*, David Carlier, Jakub Zelenka, Nicolas Grekas*, Volker Dusch*, Calvin Buckle* | Implemented in PHP 8.5 |
| PHP 8.5 Warnings | Gina P. Banyard | Implemented in PHP 8.5 |
| Add get_error_handler(), get_exception_handler() | Arnaud Le Blanc | Implemented in PHP 8.5 |
| Stream Error Handling | Jakub Zelenka | Accepted |
| TLS Session Resumption | Jakub Zelenka | Accepted |
| Make round() behave correctly as float | Saki Takamachi | Draft |
| Policy Release Process Update | Jakub Zelenka | Accepted |
| Context Managers | Arnaud Le Blanc & Larry Garfield* | In Discussion |
| Partial Function Application v2 | Arnaud Le Blanc & Larry Garfield* | In Implementation |
| URI Followup | Máté Kocsis | Vote started |
| Deprecate PECL / Adopt PIE | James Titcumb | Accepted |
| Pattern Matching | Ilija Tovilo & Larry Garfield* | In Discussion |
| JSON Validation Schema Support | Jakub Zelenka | In Discussion |
| Void as Null | Gina P. Banyard | In Discussion |
| TidyException Type for Tidy | David Carlier | In Discussion |
| Deprecate Type Juggling | Gina P. Banyard | Declined |
| Make OPcache a non-optional part of PHP | Tim Düsterhus*, Arnaud Le Blanc, Ilija Tovilo | Implemented in 8.5 |
| Asymmetric Visibility for Static Properties | Ilija Tovilo & Larry Garfield* | Implemented in 8.5 |
| Followup Improvements for ext/uri | Máté Kocsis | Accepted |
*This person was not a contractor for The PHP Foundation at time of authorship, but is acknowledged here for their contribution to the RFC
Our sponsors and individual contributors are the lifeblood of The PHP Foundation, for without their continued support, we would not be able to continue making meaningful contributions and improvements to the PHP language.
Our highest level sponsors for 2025 were Sovereign Tech Agency, JetBrains, Automattic, GoDaddy.com, Passbolt, Sentry, Les-Tilleuls.coop, Craft CMS, Private Packagist, Cybozu, Tideways, Manychat, Zend by Perforce, CH Studio, and Aternos GmbH.
Overall, 536 organizations and individuals sponsored The PHP Foundation in 2025, which is substantially less than the previous year. This is an indication of an increasingly challenging fundraising space in the open source ecosystem, a reality our peers at other Foundations and Open Source projects are also navigating.
We are incredibly grateful for all those who have financially supported and continue to support The PHP Foundation.
In 2025, The PHP Foundation was financially backed by organizations and individuals with the goal of paying a competitive salary to as many core developers as possible. These numbers represent figures in USD.
| 2021-2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025** | |
| Total donated | $ 712,484 | $ 478,767 | $ 683,550 | $ 730,534 |
| Fees * | $ 90,273 | $ 60,098 | $ 83,110 | $ 85,343 |
| Total received | $ 622,211 | $ 418,669 | $ 600,440 | $ 645,191 |
| Expenses | $ 133,285 | $ 275,181 | $ 635,487 | $ 784,376 |
*Fees include a 10% Open Source Collective fiscal host fee (dealing with contracts, expense reviews and payments, bank account management, official registrations and dealing with government requirements, open collective platform development etc), and 1-5% percent of payment processing fees, depending on the payment method used.
**Starting in 2025, some funds were donated and paid in Euro; please allow for small rounding variance due to conversion rates.
All incoming and outgoing transactions of The PHP Foundation are publicly available to view for anyone: https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET
The PHP Foundation represents a community of core PHP developers and advocates for the PHP programming language. The PHP Foundation used the channels listed below for public communication:
We will continue to grow our social media presence as a means of connecting with the broader PHP community.
In the previous report, we outlined a few organizational and technical goals. Let's take a look at how we did.
Secure funding to support core development and marketing initiatives. ✅
The PHP Foundation received funds as noted above to continue our focus on core development and the marketing of PHP and The PHP Foundation.
Launch the "PHP 30" anniversary campaign in collaboration with JetBrains. ✅
The PHP Foundation celebrated 30 years of PHP at the PHPverse conference hosted by JetBrains.
Consolidate and grow social media presence across multiple platforms. ✅
The reach and engagement for our social media accounts grew in every platform.
Increase website traffic through improved documentation and resources. ❓
We only added tracking to the php.net website toward the end of 2024, so we did not have a baseline for comparison. This is something we can measure moving forward.
Develop an Ambassador Program. ❌
This was discussed, but not launched. Look for a version of this in 2026.
Begin preparation for the "PHP Next" marketing campaign to highlight PHP's modernization. ❌
This was discussed, but not launched. Look for a version of this in 2026.
Modernize PHP's website with updated downloads page, documentation, and homepage. ⚠️ Partial
This was partially completed and included a redesigned page for the 8.5 release and a clearer and more functional Downloads page. There is still work to be done on the homepage and in the documentation.
Continue on-going maintenance and development of the PHP core. ✅
As demonstrated in this report, our contractors continue to focus on improving the PHP core.
Establish a working group for integrating modern HTTP server capabilities into PHP core. ✅
Instead, the PHP project incorporated the FrankenPHP project into its GitHub organization, offering a modern solution to running PHP in an HTTP server. This change was initiated by engineers at Les-Tilleuls.coop, and implemented in partnership with the PHP Foundation.
Address key developer experience pain points, particularly for first-time users. ⚠️ Partial
This was partially completed with the improvements on the Downloads page, but there is still much work and research to be done here.
2026 brings its own challenges but we are committed to continuing to make a measurable difference in the PHP language and ecosystem.
Total expenses exceeded total received donations by approximately $139,000 in 2025, which was a deliberate choice to maintain investment in technical headcount while we strengthen relationships with sponsors and individual contributors. The PHP Foundation remains financially solvent with healthy reserves, and reducing this gap is a 2026 priority.
We will also continue to utilize Open Collective as our fiscal host, as they provide transparency and a suite of valuable financial services for The PHP Foundation.
The work in this report is the runway for what's next. We head into 2026 with real momentum and a clear sense of what the community has asked of us. None of the technical leadership, the security work, the new partnerships ahead, and the support for the PHP ecosystem happens without the people who fund us. With your help, together we can keep PHP thriving in a changing open source world.