Hire a Laravel Developer: Find and Vet Real Experience

Laravel 13 shipped on 17 March 2026 and requires PHP 8.3. Five days earlier, on 12 March, security fixes for Laravel 11 ended. So if you run a Laravel app and you’re hiring, you are often looking for two things at once: someone to build features and someone who can carry the next upgrade.

The good news is that Laravel is the most widely used PHP framework by a distance. Of the 1,720 developers in the JetBrains State of PHP 2025 survey, 64 percent said they use it. The less good news: “Laravel” on a CV can mean anything from five years in production to one weekend tutorial.

What separates Laravel experience from PHP experience

Laravel does a lot for you. That’s the point. It’s also the trap. You can work with it for a long time without understanding what happens underneath. Experienced Laravel developers know the shortcuts and know when they get expensive.

Practically, that means they understand the SQL Eloquent generates. They know when work belongs on a queue and what happens when a job fails halfway. They write feature tests with PHPUnit or Pest. And they’ve been through at least one major upgrade.

That last point gets underestimated. Laravel ships a new major version every year, around the first quarter, with 18 months of bug fixes and two years of security fixes. Any app that lives longer than two years will face upgrades on a schedule.

Those dates come from the official Laravel release notes. For hiring, they mean this: if your app runs Laravel 11 or older, upgrade experience belongs on your must-have list. Our article on PHP upgrade cost helps you size that work.

A queue job that exposes real experience

The fastest test is code from everyday Laravel work. Show candidates this job and ask what could go wrong in production:

<?php

namespace App\Jobs;

use App\Models\Subscription;
use App\Services\PaymentGateway;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Queue\Queueable;

class ChargeSubscription implements ShouldQueue
{
    use Queueable;

    public function __construct(public Subscription $subscription) {}

    public function handle(PaymentGateway $gateway): void
    {
        $gateway->charge(
            $this->subscription->customer_id,
            $this->subscription->price_cents,
        );

        $this->subscription->update(['paid_until' => now()->addMonth()]);
    }
}

Someone who has run queues in production spots the issue quickly. If the charge succeeds and the update then fails, or the worker dies in between, the job is retried. The customer gets charged twice. Same story if the job is dispatched twice by accident.

Strong answers look something like this:

// same imports as above, plus:
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldBeUnique;

final class ChargeSubscription implements ShouldQueue, ShouldBeUnique
{
    use Queueable;

    public int $tries = 3;
    public int $backoff = 60;

    public function __construct(
        public Subscription $subscription,
        public string $period, // e.g. "2026-11"
    ) {}

    public function uniqueId(): string
    {
        return "{$this->subscription->id}:{$this->period}";
    }

    public function handle(PaymentGateway $gateway): void
    {
        if ($this->subscription->payments()->where('period', $this->period)->exists()) {
            return; // already charged for this period
        }

        $charge = $gateway->charge(
            customerId: $this->subscription->customer_id,
            amountInCents: $this->subscription->price_cents,
            idempotencyKey: "sub-{$this->subscription->id}-{$this->period}",
        );

        $this->subscription->payments()->create([
            'period' => $this->period,
            'gateway_charge_id' => $charge->id,
        ]);
    }
}

The follow-up questions matter more than the code. Why the idempotency key, when there’s already a check in the database? Because the check and the charge aren’t atomic; the payment provider is the only place that can reliably refuse a duplicate. Why ShouldBeUnique? It stops duplicates from piling up in the queue, but it is not a guarantee on its own. Who gets alerted when all three tries fail?

Candidates who reason like that have run Laravel in production. More questions in this style are in our list of PHP interview questions.

Questions that reveal upgrade experience

Upgrade experience is hard to read from a CV. “Laravel 8 to 12” can mean someone led four upgrades. It can equally mean four years on a project that other people upgraded.

Three questions help tell them apart:

1. Walk me through your last major upgrade. What broke?
2. Which packages held you up, and what did you do about them?
3. How did you know everything still worked after deploying?

On the first, listen for detail. Good answers mention the official upgrade guide, a dedicated branch, tools such as Rector or Laravel Shift, and an order of operations: PHP first, framework next, packages last. Weak answers stay at “it went fine”.

The third question separates people with a testing habit from everyone else. JetBrains reports that 32 percent of PHP developers write no tests at all. Upgrading an untested Laravel app is flying blind, and an experienced developer knows it.

1. PHPUnit50 %
2. PHPStan36 %
3. PHP CS Fixer30 %
4. Pest17 %
5. Rector10 %

Source: JetBrains, State of PHP 2025

The chart is useful context for interviews. Pest is growing fast in the Laravel world, so a candidate who only knows PHPUnit isn’t behind. Someone who knows neither is.

Where Laravel developers gather

The Laravel community is well organised, which helps. Places to meet people who take the framework seriously:

• LaraJobs, the job board linked from the official Laravel site
• Laravel and PHP meetups in larger cities, many with open talk slots
• Laracon conferences in the US and Europe, among other places
• GitHub: authors of Laravel packages published on Packagist
• the Laravel Partners directory, if you’d rather hire an agency team

GitHub deserves a closer look. Someone who maintains a package with tests and a changelog shows more than any CV. Write to them personally and refer to their work, not with a template.

General advice on channels and outreach is in our guide on how to hire a PHP developer. For Laravel roles, one extra tip: put the version and front-end stack in the first line. “Laravel 12, Livewire 3, upgrade to 13 planned for Q1” filters better than any requirements list.

Junior, mid-level, senior: what to expect

Titles stretch. It’s more useful to describe what the person can handle alone.

For an app that already runs and earns money, a junior as your only Laravel developer is a poor bet. They have nobody to learn from, and you have nobody to check their decisions. What senior-level looks like is covered in senior PHP developer skills.

Laravel only, or Symfony people too?

Sometimes a Laravel-only search is too narrow. Laravel builds on Symfony components and the core ideas overlap. Good Symfony developers who want to switch are usually productive in a Laravel project within weeks.

If you’re still picking a framework for your next project, read our Laravel vs Symfony comparison before you write the ad. The framework decides who you need to find.

And if what you really need isn’t a team of your own but reliable ongoing work on an existing Laravel app, studios such as OnlineBuilders take that on, operations included.

Next step: open your composer.json, note the Laravel and PHP versions, and put both in the first line of your job post. Whoever replies will know what they’re signing up for.

Questions people ask

Does a Laravel developer cost more than a general PHP developer?

Public salary data rarely splits by framework, so there's no clean answer. Experience, location and responsibility move pay far more. Among freelancers in the German-speaking market, freelancermap found medians for most technologies clustered between 85 and 90 euros an hour in 2026.

Can a Symfony developer work on a Laravel project?

Usually, after a few weeks of ramp-up. Laravel is built partly on Symfony components, and routing, the service container and middleware work along similar lines. Eloquent's Active Record style and Laravel's conventions take the most getting used to.

Do Laravel developers need front-end skills?

That depends on your stack. With Livewire most logic stays in PHP. With Inertia plus Vue or React, the person needs solid JavaScript. Say which one you use in the ad.