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What Automattic announced
Automattic said it would reduce its sponsored contributions to WordPress. That means employees whose work on WordPress is funded or supported by Automattic—not that the company would stop all WordPress-related activity.
The company said some affected employees would move toward commercial products including WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack and WooCommerce. It also said its remaining qualifying WordPress work would focus heavily on security and critical updates, with broader participation expected to resume after the legal conflict with WP Engine ended.
Automattic’s January 9 announcement described the intended Five for the Future pledge as approximately 45 hours per week. The announcement did not say Automattic was abandoning WordPress Core, WordPress.org or the wider WordPress ecosystem.
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Read Automattic’s January 9, 2025 announcement.
Why Automattic made the change
Automattic linked the decision to its legal dispute with WP Engine. The company said defending the litigation was consuming money and staff time, and argued that commercial businesses benefiting from WordPress should contribute more proportionately to the project.
That is Automattic’s explanation and should not be treated as an established legal finding. WP Engine disputed Automattic’s characterization of its contribution and argued that WordPress support should not be measured solely by Five for the Future hours. WP Engine pointed to code, community, educational, product-maintenance and other work in its cease-and-desist correspondence.
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The dispute also involved WordPress trademark usage, access to WordPress.org services and infrastructure, and control and distribution of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. Automattic published a proposed arrangement under which WP Engine would either pay a royalty equal to 8% of gross revenue or commit equivalent employee salary resources to WordPress Core work. Those were proposed terms, not an accepted agreement.
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Automattic’s proposed term sheet and its broader position on the dispute present only Automattic’s side of those issues.
What “matching WP Engine” meant
The phrase primarily referred to Automattic’s Five for the Future pledge. It did not mean that Automattic would match every form of WP Engine’s WordPress activity, revenue, employee count or total ecosystem contribution.
Five for the Future encourages organizations to dedicate at least 5% of their resources to WordPress-related work. The program’s handbook describes that target as aspirational rather than a strict requirement, and says qualifying work should directly support WordPress teams or the open-source project.
Several measures are easy to confuse:
- Pledge hours: a company’s publicly stated commitment through Five for the Future.
- Contributors: people listed on a pledge page, not necessarily full-time WordPress employees.
- Core contributions: recorded code and related contributions, which are not equivalent to weekly labor hours.
- Broader project work: security, documentation, support, translations, events, community programs, infrastructure, Gutenberg, Openverse and other activities.
Automattic’s January announcement cited roughly 45 hours per week as the target. The current WP Engine pledge page retrieved for this article lists 12 hours per week. Those figures come from different points in time and may reflect changing pledges or measurement practices; the 45-hour figure should not be presented as WP Engine’s current total contribution.
The contribution figures changed over time
| Date or snapshot | Automattic | WP Engine | What the figures show |
|---|---|---|---|
| September 21, 2024 | About 3,915 hours per week | About 40 hours per week | Figures presented by Matt Mullenweg on WordPress.org, not an independent audit. |
| January 9, 2025 | Target of about 45 hours per week | Used as the comparison level | Automattic’s announced Five for the Future reduction. |
| Current pledge snapshot | 90 contributors and 2,079 hours per week | Eight contributors and 12 hours per week | Values on the respective WordPress.org pledge pages; pages can change. |
The historical numbers should not be mixed together as if they measured the same thing. Mullenweg’s 2024 comparison, Automattic’s January target and the current pledge pages are dated snapshots. None independently establishes the full amount or impact of either company’s WordPress work.
See the September 2024 WordPress.org comparison, the Automattic pledge page and the WP Engine pledge page.
Automattic later returned to WordPress
On May 29, 2025, Automattic announced that it was returning fully to the WordPress project. It specifically named WordPress Core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse and WordPress.org.
Subsequent WordPress Core monthly reports recorded renewed Automattic activity:
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- July 2025: 12 recorded Core contributions associated with seven Automattic contributors.
- August 2025: 86 contributions associated with 18 contributors.
- September 2025: 86 contributions associated with 18 contributors.
- October 2025: 203 contributions associated with 40 contributors.
These are recorded Core contributions or props for each month, not hours worked. They therefore cannot be directly compared with a Five for the Future pledge measured in weekly hours.
Read Automattic’s return announcement. The relevant Core reports are available for July, August, September and October.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the episode means for WordPress
The immediate lesson is not that WordPress stopped functioning when Automattic reduced its participation. The more important issue is concentration risk: how much maintenance, infrastructure work, release knowledge and project influence should depend on one company or one group of companies?
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The event also shows why “contribution” is difficult to measure. Hours may indicate capacity, but not necessarily the importance of the work. Core patches, security response, release leadership, documentation, support, community organizing, hosting infrastructure and educational work all benefit the ecosystem in different ways.
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- Who maintains the components your sites depend on?
- How quickly are security issues handled?
- Is important knowledge concentrated in one vendor?
- Can your site be migrated if a hosting or platform relationship changes?
- Does a company’s commercial product work also benefit the independent WordPress project?
Automattic’s commercial WordPress products and WP Engine’s hosting and developer products may both contribute to the ecosystem, but commercial activity is not automatically equivalent to neutral community contribution. Hosting quality, support, performance, governance, legal risk and portability should be evaluated separately from pledge figures.
Legal status and the limits of the claims
The contribution disagreement formed part of WP Engine’s lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg. According to WP Engine’s July 8, 2026 litigation update, discovery had concluded on May 14, 2026, hearings on discovery issues had been scheduled for May 27 and May 29, and arguments on motions to dismiss had been scheduled for June 25. WP Engine also said a September 2025 ruling allowed most of its claims—including intentional-interference, unfair-competition and defamation claims—to proceed.
Those are procedural developments reported by WP Engine. Allowing claims to proceed is not a finding that WP Engine won, and it does not establish that Automattic’s allegations were true. A definitive current legal conclusion should be checked against the court docket.
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WP Engine’s July 8, 2026 litigation update.
Bottom line
Automattic did announce a temporary reduction in sponsored WordPress contributions in January 2025 and said it would bring its Five for the Future commitment down to roughly WP Engine’s level. But it did not announce an abandonment of WordPress, and it announced a full return to the project four months later. Current pledge data and later Core reports therefore make “Automattic reduced its contribution to match WP Engine” a historical description—not an accurate summary of Automattic’s present participation.
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