From the Semantic Versioning 2.0 spec: > Major version X (X.y.z | X > 0) MUST be incremented if any backwards incompatible changes are introduced to the public

From the Semantic Versioning 2.0 spec: > Major version X (X.y.z | X > 0) MUST be incremented if any backwards incompatible changes are introduced to the public API. It MAY include minor and patch level changes. Patch and minor version MUST be reset to 0 when major version is incremented. [Emphasis added] I believe the intent of the sentence I've italicized is that while backwards incompatibility requires incrementing the major version, the converse is not necessary: a major version bump does not require backwards incompatibility.