Unicode 18.0 publishes on September 16, 2026. The date was fixed on July 30, and the same meeting pulled one script, Chisoi, back out of the release and sent its 40 characters to Unicode 19.0. It is also the first Unicode release scheduled on a Wednesday.
Until UTC #188, the Consortium's own version page for Unicode 18.0 read "2026 September NN". The month was committed. The day was a placeholder. That placeholder is now filled in.
The committee's formal consensus authorises the release of Unicode 18.0 and its five synchronised companion standards, UTS #10, #39, #46, #51 and #58, "with a target release date of September 16, 2026."
The day of the week is new. Unicode has published on Tuesdays for years, and 17.0, 16.0 and 15.1 all landed on one. September 16, 2026 is a Wednesday. That is deliberate. The Release Management Group found Tuesday publication "often challenging due to many national holidays being on Mondays," and moved all future releases to Wednesdays. Unicode 18.0 is the first under the new convention.
The paperwork caught the switch mid-flight. A draft of UTS #51, the emoji annex, was posted on July 24, four days before the meeting. It still carried an Emoji 18.0 date of 2026-09-15. September 15 is a Tuesday. The release slipped exactly one day to clear the new rule.
Chisoi is a modern script, not an ancient one. It writes Kurmali, a language of northeast India, in 40 characters. Its road into the standard was long: provisionally assigned in 2023, accepted for encoding in Unicode 17.0, then re-targeted to 18.0. It shipped in the 18.0 beta in May, and our own beta coverage listed it among the release's four new scripts.
It will not be in the September release, and the cause sits outside Unicode. ISO/IEC 10646 is the parallel character standard, developed in lockstep with Unicode. Its working group processed comments on the matching edition and removed Chisoi to allow more time for national body review.
Unicode has to stay synchronised with ISO, so UTC #188 followed. It reverted the earlier approval, set Chisoi's 40 characters back to provisionally assigned at their existing codepoint range (U+16D80–U+16DA9), and moved the script into the Unicode 19.0 pipeline.
Chisoi is not in trouble. A national body review is a procedural step rather than a rejection, and the script already sits in the published preliminary repertoire for Unicode 19.0. It is late, not cancelled.
| What the beta said | What UTC #188 decided |
|---|---|
| Four new scripts: Small Seal, Jurchen, Proto-Cuneiform and Chisoi | Three. Chisoi postponed to Unicode 19.0 |
| 13,047 new characters | 13,007, exactly 40 fewer, and restated on the Consortium's own version page |
Small Seal characters named SEAL CHARACTER-XXXXX | Renamed to SMALL SEAL CHARACTER-XXXXX, all 11,328 characters |
| Final release "expected September 2026" | Authorized for September 16, 2026 |
Sourced from the Release Management Group's report to UTC #188, which records each decision as a formal committee consensus, cross-checked against the Consortium's own Unicode 18.0 version page. That page carries the revised 13,007 total; at the time of the meeting it still used the pre-rename "Seal" script name.
Two figures on our own Unicode 18.0 beta review entry stopped being true on July 30: it counted Chisoi among four new scripts and put the character total at 13,047. Both were right at beta. That page now carries the corrected numbers with the beta figures kept alongside them, which is what this log is for.
The confirmed date sharpens every other Unicode 18.0 page we run. The UAE dirham symbol now has a publication day rather than a vague month, and so does the wider Middle East currency symbol scorecard. Publishing only fixes a character in the standard, though. It does not put the character on anyone's keyboard, and on the Unicode 17.0 pattern that second step runs through 2027.
For symbols you can type today, currency symbols is the browsable set and alt codes covers the ones with no key of their own.
The emoji subcommittee's report recommends "no changes to the emoji repertoire" for Unicode 18.0. All nine new characters stand as approved, and the meeting's action items call for a complete set of final Emoji 18.0 charts on the same September 16 track. One thing did change, and it is cosmetic: three chart glyphs were redrawn to narrow the gap between how different vendors render them. We take the nine one by one, with the public vote, in a separate entry.
Unicode 19.0 already has a published preliminary repertoire, with Chisoi now in it. Alongside it sit the Sirmauri script, Proto-Cuneiform expansions, a block of Leibnizian "ambiguous signs" (plus/minus variants used for dating manuscripts, not the calculus notation the name suggests), and a new Belarusian ruble sign at U+20C5. Belarus's own central bank submitted that one, modelled on the property treatment the Saudi riyal sign received before it.
None of it is approved. The Release Management Group noted that it "is not requesting any UTC action at this time," and formal approvals are possible at either of the next two meetings. As of September 2, 2026 no date is set for those decisions. We add an entry here when one lands.
Everything in the library is live today. Copy a symbol or emoji without waiting for September.
Open the Unicode Library →All decisions above are recorded in the Release Management Group Report to UTC #188 (L2/26-160R), dated July 28, 2026 and revised after the meeting, with release-phase context from unicode.org/versions/Unicode18.0.0. Beta-stage figures for comparison come from the Consortium's beta review announcement.