Postgres 17 is in Beta on Heroku Postgres
Change effective on 08 May 2025
Update 2025-05-19: Postgres 17 beta is available on Heroku Postgres Essential tier
Postgres 17 is now available in beta on Heroku for Standard-, Premium-, Private- and Shield-tier databases. This version bringing several notable features and performance improvements to our managed Postgres database service. The beta provides an easy way for customers to try out the new release. Postgres 16 continues to be the default version for new databases until we make version 17 generally available.
Read the Postgres project’s release notes for version 17 here.
Running Postgres 17 on Heroku Postgres
To provision a new database with Postgres 17, pass the --version 17 flag:
$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql -a example-app -- --version 17
You can also use pg:upgrade and pg:copy to upgrade your database to Postgres 17. Test on your existing data by forking your database and following the pg:upgrade process.
Postgres 14 Deprecation Note
To provide the best developer experience on Heroku, we’ll deprecate Postgres 14 when Postgres 17 becomes generally available per our policy.
PostGIS Upgrades
PostGIS 2.x is only supported on Postgres 13 and earlier. Installing the PostGIS extension on PG 17 installs PostGIS 3 by default. Upgrading your database via pg:upgrade also upgrades the PostGIS version to 3.3.