What's new in Matplotlib 3.11.0 (Jun 11, 2026)#

For a list of all of the issues and pull requests since the last revision, see the GitHub statistics for 3.11.0 (Jun 11, 2026).

Figure creation / management #

Figures can be attached to and removed from pyplot #

Figures can now be attached to and removed from management through pyplot, which in the background also means a less strict coupling to backends.

In particular, standalone figures (created with the Figure constructor) can now be registered with the pyplot module by calling plt.figure(fig). This allows showing them with plt.show() as you would do with any figure created with pyplot factory functions such as plt.figure() or plt.subplots().

When closing a shown figure window, the related figure is reset to the standalone state, i.e., it's not visible to pyplot anymore, but if you still hold a reference to it, you can continue to work with it (e.g. do fig.savefig(), or re-add it to pyplot with plt.figure(fig) and then show it again).

The following is now possible — though the example is exaggerated to show what's possible. In practice, you'll stick with much simpler versions for better consistency

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.figure import Figure

# Create a standalone figure
fig = Figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot()
ax.plot([1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6])

# Register it with pyplot
plt.figure(fig)

# Modify the figure through pyplot
plt.xlabel("x label")

# Show the figure
plt.show()

# Close the figure window through the GUI

# Continue to work on the figure
fig.savefig("my_figure.png")
ax.set_ylabel("y label")

# Re-register the figure and show it again
plt.figure(fig)
plt.show()

Figure size units #

When creating figures, it is now possible to define figure sizes in centimetres or pixels.

Up to now the figure size is specified via plt.figure(..., figsize=(6, 4)), and the given numbers are interpreted as inches. It is now possible to add a unit string to the tuple, i.e. plt.figure(..., figsize=(600, 400, "px")). Supported unit strings are "in", "cm", or "px".

Partial `figsize` specification at figure creation #

Figure creation now accepts a single None in figsize. Passing (None, h) uses the default width from rcParams["figure.figsize"] (default: [6.4, 4.8]), and passing (w, None) uses the default height. Passing (None, None) is invalid and raises a ValueError.

For example:

plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (14, 11)
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(None, 4))  # Size will be (14, 4)

Subplot parameters are reset in `Figure.clear`#

When calling Figure.clear() the settings for gridspec.SubplotParams are restored to the default values.

SubplotParams.to_dict is a new method to get the subplot parameters as a dict, and SubplotParams.reset resets the parameters to the defaults.

Plotting methods #

Grouped bar charts #

The new method grouped_bar() simplifies the creation of grouped bar charts significantly. It supports different input data types (lists of datasets, dicts of datasets, data in 2D arrays, pandas DataFrames), and allows for easy customization of placement via controllable distances between bars and between bar groups.

categories = ['A', 'B']
datasets = {
    'dataset 0': [1, 11],
    'dataset 1': [3, 13],
    'dataset 2': [5, 15],
}

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.grouped_bar(datasets, tick_labels=categories)
ax.legend()