Amazon Aurora now supports PostgreSQL 18.1 in the Amazon RDS Database preview environment

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostgreSQL version 18.1 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to evaluate PostgreSQL 18.1 on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL 18.1 was released by the PostgreSQL community on September 9, 2025.

PostgreSQL 18.1 includes "skip scan" support for multicolumn B-tree indexes and improves WHERE clause handling for OR and IN conditions. It introduces parallel GIN index builds and updates join operations. Observability improvements show buffer usage counts and index lookups during query execution, along with a per-connection I/O utilization metric. To learn more about PostgreSQL 18.1, read here.

Database instances in the RDS Database Preview Environment allow testing of a new database engine without the hassle of having to self-install, provision, and manage a preview version of the Aurora PostgreSQL database software. Clusters are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after this retention period. Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production Aurora instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region.

Amazon Aurora is designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. It provides built-in security, continuous backups, serverless compute, up to 15 read replicas, automated multi-Region replication, and integrations with other AWS services. To get started with Amazon Aurora, take a look at our getting started page.