Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 Migration: What It Actually Costs in 2026 and How Long It Takes?

If you're still running Drupal 7, you already know the deadline pressure. Community support has officially ended, security patches are drying up, and every month that passes makes the eventual migration a little more expensive. But the question everyone actually wants answered isn't "should I migrate" — it's "what is this going to cost me, and how long am I going to be stuck in this process?"

The honest answer: it depends a lot more on your site's history than most agencies will tell you upfront. Here's what we've seen in practice.

There's no D7-to-D11 "upgrade button"

Drupal 7 to 11 is closer to a rebuild. The architecture changed completely — Drupal 8 introduced Symfony components, a new theming engine (Twig replaced PHPTemplate), configuration management moved to YAML files, and the module ecosystem essentially had to be rewritten from scratch.

So when someone says "migrate my Drupal 7 site to Drupal 11," what's actually happening is: a new Drupal 11 site gets built, and your content, users, and structure get moved into it. Your old custom code, your old theme, and most of your old contrib modules don't come along for the ride — they get rebuilt or replaced.

What drives the cost

The price tag swings wildly because these factors compound:

• Content volume and complexity
• Custom modules
• Theme rebuild
• Contributed module availability
• Integrations
• Unique components

Realistic cost ranges

These numbers are intentionally broad because every site is genuinely different, but here's roughly what we see:

• Small brochure-style site (under 50 pages, minimal custom functionality, standard content types): often falls somewhere in the $6,000–$20,000 range. Most of the cost here is theme rebuild and content migration.
• Mid-size site (custom content types, moderate custom code, a few integrations, several thousand nodes): typically lands between $20,000–$60,000. Custom module audits and rewrites start eating a real chunk of the budget here.
• Large or complex site (heavy customization, e-commerce, multilingual, complex permission structures, large content volumes, multiple integrations): can run $75,000 and well beyond, sometimes into six figures for enterprise platforms.

If a quote you've received seems dramatically lower than these ranges, it's worth asking specifically what's included — particularly whether custom module review and theme rebuild are part of the scope, or whether those will be billed separately once discovered. The code quality analysis, at times agencies use regular PHP code, direct SQL queries and does not follow Drupal coding standards to get the cost down but falls off on the longer run in terms of upgrade, performance, security & SEO.

How long does it actually take?

Timeline tends to track cost pretty closely, but with a wrinkle: discovery often takes longer than people expect, and it has to happen before anyone can give you a real estimate.

• Discovery and audit phase — usually 1–3 weeks. Someone needs to go through your existing site: inventory the modules, check which ones have Drupal 10 equivalents, review custom code, map out content types and fields, and identify integrations. Skipping this step is how projects blow past their budgets later.
• Small site: 4–8 weeks of actual build time after discovery.
• Mid-size site: 3–6 months is typical, especially once custom modules and a theme rebuild are in the mix.
• Large/complex site: 6–12 months, sometimes longer if there's a lot of legacy custom code or the team is working around a live production environment that can't go down.

Is there a cheaper path?

Some organizations consider is migrating in phases — get the core site onto Drupal 11 first with a simplified theme and essential functionality, then layer in the more complex custom features afterward. This spreads the cost over time and gets you off Drupal 7's unsupported status sooner, even if the "full" migration takes longer overall.

The bottom line

If you take one thing away from this: get a proper discovery audit before committing to a number. Any estimate given without someone actually looking at your site's modules, custom code, and content structure is a guess — sometimes an educated one, but still a guess. The discovery phase costs relatively little and saves you from the worst-case scenario, which is a budget that doubles three months into the project because nobody knew about that one critical custom module until they opened it up.

Drupal 7 isn't going to keep working forever, and the longer you wait, the more the security risk grows alongside the eventual migration cost. But rushing into a migration without understanding what's actually involved is how projects go sideways. Start with the audit, get a real number, and plan accordingly.