Oracle JDK 21 leaves the free NFTC license after September 2026

Oracle's Java SE Support Roadmap, updated April 2, 2026, now carries a section headed "End of Permissive Licensing of Java SE 21 (Sept 2026) approaching." The substance is one sentence: update releases of Oracle JDK 21 published after September 2026 are planned to move to the Java SE OTN license, the same terms that already cover Java 8, 11 and 17. Oracle's advice is equally short — anyone who wants a permissively licensed Java after September should move to Oracle JDK 25 or later.

None of this is improvised. The No-Fee Terms and Conditions license, in use since September 2021, covers the current long-term-support release for free, commercial and production use included, until one year after the next LTS ships. JDK 25 went GA in September 2025, which started JDK 21's twelve-month overlap. JDK 17 went through the identical sequence one cycle earlier: permissive through September 2024, OTN from the October 15, 2024 update onward.

The calendar makes the deadline concrete. Oracle's Critical Patch Updates land on the third Tuesday of January, April, July and October. The July 21, 2026 CPU was the last JDK 21 update inside the NFTC window. The next one, October 20, 2026, falls after the cutoff and is the first planned under OTN. That is about twelve weeks of runway, and it lands on the most-deployed modern LTS in the Java estate.

Worth being precise about what does not change. JDK 21 remains a supported release: Oracle Premier Support runs to September 2028, Extended Support to September 2031. The OTN license still permits personal use, development, testing, prototyping and demonstration at no cost — what it withdraws is free commercial and production use, which then requires a Java SE Universal Subscription. The change binds Oracle's own JDK 21 builds only; OpenJDK builds of 21 under GPLv2+CPE, from Oracle or any other distributor, are on a separate track, and updates already downloaded under NFTC stay under the terms they were downloaded under.

So the decision in front of a team running Oracle JDK 21 in production is a three-way one, and it is a licensing decision rather than a technical one: move to Oracle JDK 25, move to an OpenJDK build of 21, or buy the subscription. The one option that is not on the table after October is continuing to take Oracle's free security updates. I track the full Java release and support timeline on the Java versions page.