Kubernetes v1.37 tells you natively whether a volume claim is in use
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readKubernetes v1.37, in a blog post by Roman Bednář (Red Hat) on 21 September 2026, promotes the PersistentVolumeClaimUnusedSinceTime feature gate to Beta, enabled by default. With it, the PVC protection controller adds an Unused condition to each PersistentVolumeClaim, saying whether any running pod currently references it.
The problem it removes is a familiar chore. In large clusters, users create PVCs and delete the pods without cleaning up storage — Kubernetes does not delete PVCs automatically. Answering "is anything actually using this volume?" previously meant cross-referencing pods, PersistentVolumes and PVCs over a long window, and administrators built custom monitoring pipelines or scripts to do it. The feature puts the answer in the PVC's own status.
What it means
A question that needed a pipeline is now a field. The value is not a new capability but the removal of a class of glue: every team that ran a script to find orphaned volumes can delete it. That is the quiet, cumulative kind of improvement that a mature platform ships.
"Beta, enabled by default" is the line to read. It means the condition appears on your PVCs after the upgrade whether or not you asked — good for discoverability, and worth knowing for anything that lists or filters PVC conditions and did not expect a new one.
It reports, it does not reclaim. The Unused condition tells you a volume is idle; it does not delete anything. Turning that signal into cleanup is still a policy you write — the feature makes the policy possible without a bespoke data pipeline behind it.