Fifteen of 28 Drupal Core Maintainer Vacancies From 2025 Remain Unassigned

Fifteen of the 28 subsystem and topic maintainer vacancies advertised during Drupal's 2025 recruitment process remain unassigned in the current main branch roster. Twelve of the original vacancy areas received at least one maintainer during or after that process, although Settings Tray no longer appears in the current roster. REST, which was not among the original 28 vacancies, has since become unassigned, bringing the current number of unassigned subsystem and topic entries to 16.

The recruitment effort followed Drupal's 2025 annual maintainer check-in and identified 27 subsystems plus the Documentation topic without active maintainers. The DropTimes reported the vacancies on 26 November 2025, including the MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite database drivers. The current comparison measures what happened to those documented openings rather than treating the vacancies themselves as new.

Drupal tracked the recruitment process in the 2025 maintainer recruitment issue. Drupal core release manager Victoria Spagnolo reported on 18 February 2026 that, by her count, 13 subsystem maintainer positions had been filled. On 12 March, Victoria summarised the completed process as eight contributors taking positions across 11 subsystems. Those figures count appointments differently from distinct vacancy areas because some subsystems received more than one maintainer; Content Moderation and Settings Tray, for example, each had two accepted applications listed during the process.

A later appointment increased the number of original vacancy areas that had received a maintainer to 12. The Drupal 10.6.6 release notes recorded Max Pogonowski as a Token maintainer after the main recruitment issue had closed. Eleven of those 12 areas still have named maintainers in the current main roster.

Settings Tray accounts for the difference. The Drupal 11.3.4 release notes recorded Chris Weber and Mark Conroy as maintainers before Drupal approved moving the module to a contributed project. Settings Tray no longer appears in the current main maintainer roster. Ban followed a different path: it remained unfilled during the recruitment process and was removed from the Drupal 12 development branch on 23 February 2026.

The 15 original vacancy areas still unassigned in the current main roster are Automated Cron, Bootstrap, Cron, Database Update API, Filter, Inline Form Errors, Installer, Lock, Mail, Path, Request Processing, the MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite database drivers, and Documentation. REST is the additional current vacancy that was not part of the 2025 list. The Drupal 11.3.4 release notes record the removal of Wim Leers as a maintainer of CKEditor 5, Editor, JSON:API and REST; the current roster retains named maintainers for the first three areas but not REST.

The three database-driver vacancies did not all become unassigned at the same time. At the Drupal 11.2.0 roster, PostgreSQL and SQLite were already listed without maintainers, while MySQL still named David Strauss. By the Drupal 11.3.0 roster, MySQL was also unassigned.

The DropTimes calculated the current status by matching the 28 vacancies listed in Drupal's 2025 recruitment issue against the current MAINTAINERS.txt roster. Fifteen remain unassigned, 11 are represented by named maintainers, and two, Ban and Settings Tray, no longer appear in the current core roster. Settings Tray received maintainers before leaving that roster, which is why 12 of the original vacancy area