We are happy to announce the first *release candidate* of pandas 3.0.0, released last week. You can find the the list of changes in 3.0.0 in the release notes page <https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/dev/whatsnew/v3.0.0.html>. Users having pandas code in production and maintainers of libraries with pandas as a dependency are *strongly* recommended to run their test suites with the release candidate, and report any breaking change to our issue tracker <https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/> before the official 3.0.0 release. Especially the changes around the new default string dtype and Copy-on-Write are expected to require some code changes. See the linked release notes for details how to test and update your code. The release candidate is available on PyPI and conda-forge, for example: python -m pip install --upgrade pandas==3.0.0rc0 or conda install -c conda-forge/label/pandas_rc pandas==3.0.0rc0