As is mentioned in this new post on the Laravel News site, the latest version of the Laravel framework (v5.3) has officially been released:

The Laravel team is proud to announce the release of Laravel 5.3 and it’s now available for everyone. The new features in 5.3 are focused on improving developer speed by adding additional out of the box improvements for common tasks.

This is a general release and comes with six months of bug fixes and security fixes are provided for one year. Laravel 5.1 is the latest LTS release which includes bug fixes for two years and security fixes for three years.

The post also lists some of the major updates that come with the v5.3 release including:

• New Home Page (for the project)
• New packages like Laravel Passport, Laravel Scout and Laravel Echo
• Updated migration handling
• Queued job improvements

You can read the full list of changes in the rest of the post including a link to an upgrade guide for those migrating from previous versions.