diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 86ae8497..50699737 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -104,7 +104,7 @@ gemini = [
     # extract_meds.py streams MEDS rows straight to per-shard Parquet
     # files (MedsShardWriter) -- pandas' own to_parquet needs an engine,
     # and this module also uses pyarrow directly for streaming writes.
-    "pyarrow>=15.0.0",
+    "pyarrow>=26.0.0",
     # extract_meds.py's per-table transforms are vectorized polars, not
     # pandas .iterrows() -- listed here too (not just in the base
     # dependencies above) since run.sh's minimal extract-node install is
diff --git a/uv.lock b/uv.lock
index a7ec26be..3f02970c 100644
--- a/uv.lock
+++ b/uv.lock
@@ -2678,7 +2678,7 @@ requires-dist = [
     { name = "polars", marker = "extra == 'gemini'", specifier = ">=1.44.2" },
     { name = "protobuf", marker = "extra == 'text'", specifier = ">=7.36.2" },
     { name = "psycopg2-binary", marker = "extra == 'gemini'", specifier = ">=2.9.13" },
-    { name = "pyarrow", marker = "extra == 'gemini'", specifier = ">=15.0.0" },
+    { name = "pyarrow", marker = "extra == 'gemini'", specifier = ">=26.0.0" },
     { name = "scikit-learn", specifier = ">=1.9.1" },
     { name = "sentencepiece", marker = "extra == 'text'", specifier = ">=0.2.0" },
     { name = "sqlalchemy", marker = "extra == 'gemini'", specifier = ">=2.1.4" },