Is Visual Studio 2026 planned to be supported by UAT?

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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1

Hey,

Recently Visual Studio 2026 has been released. While it’s possible to install required Windows SDK and MSVC 2022 toolset suggested by the Unreal documentation, UAT gives an error “Visual Studio 2022 x64 must be installed”.

So it’s possible to install Visual Studio 2022 Editor Core with no toolsets/sdks selected and then UAT works as usual (as well, project builds normal and works as expected).

To note, while it’s not a problem for us or other companies using Visual Studio Pro/Enterprise, Visual Studio 2022 Community is not possible to be downloaded anymore (site has no such option, only Pro/Enterprise links).

Are there any plans to support Visual Studio 2026 natively (without need to install VS 2022)?

Thanks

2

Hi,

Yes, we are working to get VS 2026 fully supported and by default. The main branch is already partially on 2026 for C# code (now using .NET 10). But the C++ side is not completed. The original estimate was to bump the preferred toolchain to the one coming with VS 2026 in UE 5.8. The last info I have (January 19, 2026) is that we are blocked by a compiler crash and we are waiting for MS to fix it.

Note that we don’t plan to backport the support to previous UE versions.

Regards,

Patrick

3

Hi,

The issue about 2026 not working if 2022 is not installed should be fixed at CL 49661760 on UE5/Main. Some people report have reported using VS2026 successfully in the main stream, but those people do not necessarily need to compile everything. Some people reported better performance, another reported a significant increase in memory usage . But when people install the VS 2022 toolchains in VS 2026, it’s mostly working already. My take on all of this is that if you are mostly building the Editor and Win64 games out of main, it works ok. For console development, VS 2026 it is not tested yet as far as I’m aware.

Regards,

Patrick

4

If you can bump up not only VS2026, but toolchain versions as well, that would be great!

If newer toolchain crashes, could we still remove the requirement of VS 2022 in UAT?

VS 2026 has old 2022’s toolchains and WinSDK as well, but UAT just does not proceed generating project without VS 2022 installed regardless of toolchain setup.

5

Thanks for explanation! Waiting for new features and 5.8 then.

Best regards