Release Date: 28 May 2026

Release Note for Neo4j 2026.05.0 (28 May 2026)

 

Advanced notice of upcoming changes

The default format for the query log for new installations will be changing after the next Long Term Support (LTS) release. At the moment this is set to PLAIN format by default. From the release after the next LTS the default will become JSON format. If you are upgrading and persist your current server-logs.xml file then there will be no change, as support for PLAIN will remain, only the default value for new installations is changing. We recommend moving to JSON for query logging as this contains more information, although the resultant log file size will increase.  

Server

Discovery service for Fleet Manager

  • The server now includes the Neo4j discovery service, which can be used to identify running Neo4j deployments on the local network.
  • Neo4j-admin now supports discovery of servers on the local network. Using ‘‘neo4j-admin fleet discover’ provides a list of discovered servers.
  • Neo4j-admin can optionally be used to bulk register all discovered servers with Fleet Manager so that they appear in your Aura Console.

Neo4j-admin

Cypher-shell

  • We improved the :sysinfo command to properly support Infinigraph.

Platforms

  • The following Supported Platforms are deprecated and support will be removed in a future version:  Ubuntu Server 22.04,  macOS 15 (Sequoia), CentOS Stream 9, Windows Server 2022

Security

  • Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) for TLS / SSL network encryption has been tested and documented. This is available when using the OpenSSL provider, version 3.5 or higher.  This capability uses X25519MLKEM768 a hybrid cryptographic algorithm that combines a traditional key exchange method (X25519) with a new, post-quantum algorithm (ML-KEM-768).  This protects against what is known as HNDL (Harvest Now, Decrypt Later).  See Operations Manual -> Security -> SSL Framework -> Configuring SSL for post-quantum hybrid key exchange.

Cypher

Cypher 25 Features

  • Composable commands: several Cypher commands can now be combined in a single query and mixed with other Cypher statements. The commands currently integrated with Cypher are: SHOW INDEXES, SHOW CONSTRAINTS, SHOW CURRENT GRAPH TYPE, SHOW FUNCTIONS, SHOW PROCEDURES, SHOW SETTINGS, SHOW TRANSACTIONS, SHOW DATABASES, and TERMINATE TRANSACTIONS.
  • The ACYCLIC path mode was released in 2026.04, with the limitation that it cannot be used in conjunction with ANY, SHORTEST, SHORTEST k, ALL SHORTEST, or SHORTEST k GROUPS. That limitation is lifted in 2026.05. Users can ask for SHORTEST/ANY paths that follow the ACYCLIC path mode (no repetition of nodes in the same path). See Cypher Manual -> Mixing restrictive path selectors and explicit path modes.
  • Added new string functions: string.indexOf, string.join, string.regexReplace. This functionality was already available via apoc.text.* functions, and is now also in the native Cypher language. The related APOC functions have been deprecated. See Cypher Manual -> String functions.
 

Bug fixes

Server

  • Fixed a concurrency issue when acquiring network channels. This avoids messages being delivered out of order which would slow down the write path because the log matching would force a message to be resent.

Cypher

  • In the parallel runtime, the planner previously prioritized the Repeat operator over VarExpand for variable-length patterns when the input cardinality was exactly 1, such as during a single starting-node lookup. While this could significantly boost execution speed, it also occasionally led to dramatic increases in memory consumption, which can cause queries to fail. Consequently, this behavior is now disabled by default.

To re-enable the original behavior for specific queries, use the new parallelRepeatHeuristic preparser option:

CYPHER parallelRepeatHeuristic=enabled

MATCH (a:A {prop: 123}) ((n)-[r:R]->(m))+ (b) RETURN a, b

Accepted values for this option are enabled and disabled (the default is disabled).

  • Addressed a missing planned leveraged order in the pipelined runtime that was causing COUNT(DISTINCT) aggregations to overcount under specific conditions.
  • We now throw an error when creating an auth rule with an invalid time function, instead of failing the evaluation at authorization time.
  • Fixed an issue impacting the aggregation function stDev() (which returns the standard deviation for the given value over a group for a sample of a population). The function would return 0 rather than null for empty input. That has now been fixed, and null is returned.
  Please refer to the changelog for full details of the changes.  

Bundled products

The following products have been included in the distribution – available in /products directory unless stated otherwise – and are fully compatible with this release.
  • APOC Core 2026.05.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory).
  • Bloom 6.x-2.33.0 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
  • Browser 2026.05.26+0  – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database.
  • Neo4j GenAI Plugin 2026.05.0 – Neo4j’s GenAI plugin provides functions and procedures to interact with external AI providers through Cypher, such as for creating vector embeddings and generating text.
    • we introduce the  ai.file.embedBatch procedure
      • it reads text from a local or remote file and generates vector embeddings for its content
      • it optionally splits it in chunks and it returns one row for each chunk, containing its index, the chunk content, and its embedding vector
  • Neo4j Graph Data Science 2026.05.0 is a compatible version of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a License. )
  • Enterprise Fleet Management is no longer bundled with the DBMS package as it is now included in Neo4j.
  • Neo4j Ops Manager 1.15.2 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).
 

Recent Database Releases

See All Database Releases →