# Contract formats are versioned separately from contracts

The authored contract schema and runtime-served contract view are versioned formats, separate from each data product's own contract version. This prevents product-level contract changes from being coupled to platform schema evolution. Contract format versions follow standard semantic versioning: pre-1.0 may break, 1.x patch and minor versions remain backward-compatible, and major version bumps may break with migration tooling, validation behavior, runtime projection behavior, and agent/client support windows.