diff --git a/.travis.yml b/.travis.yml
index a5bf180e6c..0349bff0f1 100644
--- a/.travis.yml
+++ b/.travis.yml
@@ -18,11 +18,11 @@ matrix:
       provider: script
       script: Rscript -e 'pkgdown::deploy_site_github(verbose = TRUE)'
       skip_cleanup: true
-  - r: oldrel
+  - r: 3.5
+  - r: 3.4
+  - r: 3.3
   - r: 3.2
     env: R_REMOTES_NO_ERRORS_FROM_WARNINGS=true
-  - r: 3.1
-    env: R_REMOTES_NO_ERRORS_FROM_WARNINGS=true
 
 # environment variables set for all builds
 env:
diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index 3a30d17cec..3a8ace6fc5 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ Authors@R: c(
     person("RStudio", role = c("cph"))
     )
 Depends:
-    R (>= 3.1)
+    R (>= 3.2)
 Imports: 
     digest,
     grDevices,
diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index 61dd19fb8c..d55bfdf643 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -7,6 +7,9 @@ extension developers if they have relied on internals that have been changed.
 This release also sees the addition of Hiroaki Yutani (@yutannihilation) to the 
 core developer team.
 
+With the release of R 3.6, ggplot2 now requires the R version to be at least 3.2,
+as the tidyverse is committed to support 5 major versions of R.
+
 ## Breaking changes
 
 * Two patches (#2996 and #3050) fixed minor rendering problems. In most cases,