diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 4d7589a33e..c208d98652 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ maintainers = [
     {name = "Felix Dittrich"},
 ]
 readme = "README.md"
-requires-python = ">=3.8.0,<4"  # TODO: bump to >=3.9 before release
+requires-python = ">=3.9.0,<4"
 license = {file = "LICENSE"}
 keywords=["OCR", "deep learning", "computer vision", "tensorflow", "pytorch", "text detection", "text recognition"]
 classifiers=[