The PHP Foundation Impact and Transparency Report 2025 — The PHP Foundation — Supporting, Advancing, and Developing the PHP Language

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The PHP Foundation

The PHP Foundation Impact and Transparency Report 2025

Published on May 27, 2026<br>by Elizabeth Barron

Report

Executive Summary

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.

About the PHP Foundation

The PHP Foundation's main focus is to ensure the sustainability and long term viability of the PHP language. Our priorities continue to be:

Improving the language for users

Providing high-quality maintenance

Improving the project to retain current contributors and integrate new ones

Promoting the public image of PHP

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.

What we shipped in 2025

Leadership at The PHP Foundation coordinated several high-level initiatives, including:

The completion of a Security Audit by Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF), funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency through the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), and sustained security advisory work across the team

The addition of FrankenPHP to the PHP GitHub organization, in collaboration with Les-Tilleuls.coop

The development of the official PHP SDK for MCP, in collaboration with the Symfony Team and Anthropic

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:

Successful delivery of PHP 8.5

Launch of PIE 1.0 and initiation of the formal PECL deprecation process

Launch of the STF Streams modernization project

PHP Foundation representation at the OpenSSF Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group on the EU Cyber Resilience Act

The PHP Foundation Staff

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:

Arnaud Le Blanc @arnaud-lb

David Carlier @devnexen

Derick Rethans @derickr

Gina P. Banyard @Girgias

Ilija Tovilo @iluuu1994

Jakub Zelenka @bukka

James Titcumb @asgrim

Joe Watkins @krakjoe

Máté Kocsis @kocsismate

Saki Takamachi @SakiTakamachi

Shivam Mathur @shivammathur

Team Achievements

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:

PRs merged = PRs that were authored by a contractor that were merged by anyone

Community PR Reviews = PRs from other people that were reviewed/commented on by contractors

% of Bug Fixes = the percent of all bug fix PRs that were authored by a contractor but merged by anyone in the community. PRs were considered “fixes” if they included the words “fix,” “resolve,” or “bug” in the title of the PR

Language & runtime

URL/URI parsing RFC (Máté Kocsis) passed in May, representing PHP's most significant standard-library addition in years, including upstream contributions to the uriparser C library.

Gina P. Banyard drove the entire PHP 8.5 deprecations and warnings RFC to php-src and authored 173 merged PRs (roughly 16% of all merged PRs to php-src in 2025).

Arnaud Le Blanc's Tail Call VM technique merged in August, removing PHP's dependency on a single compiler for peak performance; he also co-developed Partial Function Applications v2 and Context Managers with Larry Garfield.

Ilija Tovilo was the team's leading committer to php-src (565 commits) and advanced the Pattern Matching RFC alongside deep performance work on zend_op size and TMP|VAR...