C# 15 Gets Labeled break and continue in .NET 11 Preview 7

.NET 11 Preview 7 shipped on August 11, 2026, and the C# section carries a feature the community has been asking for since roughly forever: break and continue can now name a label on an enclosing loop or switch. The championed proposal is dotnet/csharplang#9875, and the discussion list attached to it links nine separate community threads going back years.

What the syntax looks like

The label goes directly on the loop, and the jump statement names it:

outer: for (int row = 0; row < grid.Height; row++)
{
    for (int column = 0; column < grid.Width; column++)
    {
        if (grid[row, column].IsBlocked)
        {
            continue outer;
        }

        if (grid[row, column].IsGoal)
        {
            break outer;
        }
    }
}

One label serves both jumps. Without a label, break and continue behave exactly as before and target the innermost applicable statement, so this is purely additive.

The two workarounds it replaces

The bool flag version needs state that exists only to propagate the exit outward, and it has to be checked at every level:

bool found = false;
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
    for (int j = 0; j < 10; j++)
    {
        if (i * j > 20)
        {
            found = true;
            break;
        }
    }

    if (found)
        break;
}

The goto version is worse for the continue case, because the label has to sit at the end of the loop body so the incrementor and condition still run:

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
    for (int j = 0; j < 10; j++)
    {
        if (j == 5)
            goto next;
    }

    next: ; // The empty statement is required.
}

That is brittle. Any statement accidentally inserted between the label and the closing brace silently changes what the jump does. Binding the label to the loop construct itself removes that failure mode.

Two rules worth knowing before you refactor

Only the statement immediately nested inside a labeled statement gets the label. Given a: b: while (...) ..., only b labels the loop. a labels the inner labeled statement, which is not itself a loop, so break a; inside that body is a compile-time error rather than a jump to the while. The spec explicitly rejects nested labels.

Also, break can target an enclosing switch, but continue cannot. continue only ever resolves to an iteration statement, which follows from what the two jumps mean.

The analyzer that finds your existing cases

You do not have to hunt for the code that qualifies. IDE0410 (“Use labeled jump statement”) flags all three patterns: a goto jumping past a nested loop, a goto to an empty trailing label, and the bool flag propagation chain. It is on by default via csharp_style_prefer_labeled_jump_statements = true, and applies to C# 15 and later. Turn it off per project with:

[*.cs]
dotnet_diagnostic.IDE0410.severity = none

You need the .NET 11 preview SDK to try it, same as the extension indexers that landed in Preview 6. Full details are in the feature specification and the Preview 7 announcement.