[Jim Garrison (garrison)]

Python 3.10 reached end of life on October 1, 2026. Qiskit raised its own minimum to 3.11 in Qiskit/qiskit#17135, and qiskit-addon-sqd followed in Qiskit/qiskit-addon-sqd#415.

The sqd change is the one that reaches us. Our development version tests build qiskit-addon-sqd from source, so once 415 lands, its requires-python = ">=3.11" leaves the 3.10 leg of that workflow with nothing to install. 415 keeps its qiskit range unchanged, so it is sqd's own floor doing this rather than the Qiskit resolution behind it.

Worth being explicit that neither upstream change is released yet: 17135 is on Qiskit's main but in no tag, and the newest qiskit on PyPI is 2.6.0, still declaring >=3.10. So the minimum and latest version jobs would both keep working on 3.10 for a while. This follows the floor our dependencies have already chosen; it is not fixing a job that is red today.

What changed

• requires-python is now >=3.11, and the 3.10 classifier is gone.
• tox.ini: 3.10 is out of envlist and out of the factored notebook environment names. The comment above that section used py310-notebook as its example, so it moved too.
• The minimum, latest, and development version workflows drop 3.10 from their matrices. docs.yml pinned 3.10 and now pins 3.11.
• INSTALL.md said "Python 3.10+" in its prerequisites.

Dependency floors

No floor had to move, which is worth stating explicitly since this is the part that usually turns the minimum-version job red. That job rewrites every >= to ==, so the declared floor is what gets installed. All of them resolve on 3.11: numpy 1.26.0, pytest 8.0, pytest-mpi 0.6, qiskit-addon-sqd 0.13.1, pyscf 2.9, nbmake 1.5.0.

mpi4py==4.0.0 is the one that looks like a problem and is not. It publishes no wheel matching 3.11, so pip builds it from the sdist — exactly as it already does on 3.10 today. It declares Requires-Python >=3.6, so this is a wheel coverage gap rather than a Python support boundary.

Verification

Ran against Python 3.11 locally: tox -e py311 (51 passed), tox -e mpi (23 passed), and tox -e docs, which builds with -W and renders the release note. Also simulated the minimum-version job with extremal-python-dependencies pin-dependencies-to-minimum and confirmed the fully pinned set resolves on 3.11.

tox -l and tox -a agree, so the py31X-notebook environments are really defined rather than silently falling through to the unit tests.

Not labelled for stable backport: raising a minimum Python version is not something to put into the 1.7 series.

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This pull request was drafted by Claude Opus 5 under my guidance.