diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 9dabb41..62fae82 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ authors = [
 description = "An OCR evaluation tool"
 readme = "README.md"
 license.file = "LICENSE"
-requires-python = ">=3.9"
+requires-python = ">=3.8"
 keywords = ["qurator", "ocr", "evaluation", "ocr-d"]
 
 dynamic = ["version", "dependencies", "optional-dependencies"]