diff --git a/.bumpversion.cfg b/.bumpversion.cfg
index 2caff813d..21ad73363 100644
--- a/.bumpversion.cfg
+++ b/.bumpversion.cfg
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 [bumpversion]
-current_version = 5.4.2
+current_version = 5.5.0rc1
 commit = True
 tag = True
 parse = (?P<major>\d+)\.(?P<minor>\d+)\.(?P<patch>\d+)(?P<releaselevel>[a-z]+)?
diff --git a/Changelog.rst b/Changelog.rst
index 8a21f7f20..1791d4b8c 100644
--- a/Changelog.rst
+++ b/Changelog.rst
@@ -4,6 +4,51 @@
  Change history
 ================
 
+.. _version-5.5.0rc1:
+
+5.5.0rc1
+========
+:release-date: 14 Oct, 2024
+:release-by: Tomer Nosrati
+
+Key Highlights
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+Native Delayed Delivery
+-----------------------
+
+Official support to `RabbitMQ Delayed Delivery <https://docs.particular.net/transports/rabbitmq/delayed-delivery>`_,
+which is required to enable ETA tasks with quorum queues in Celery.
+
+urllib3 instead of curl
+-----------------------
+
+We can finally say goodbye to the :pypi:`pycurl` dependency and use :pypi:`urllib3` instead.
+
+What's Changed
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+- Pin tzdata to latest version 2024.2 (#2121)
+- Refactored CI (#2122)
+- Added unit tests to "tox -e parallel" environment (#2123)
+- Improve pre-commit checks and fix all new lint errors (#2124)
+- Removed codecov flags (#2126)
+- Pin pre-commit to latest version 3.8.0 (#2125)
+- Limit redis-py <5.1.0 (#2132)
+- Removed "on push" from the linter GitHub Actions workflow (#2133)
+- Bump pymongo from 4.9.1 to 4.10.0 (#2130)
+- Update pymongo to 4.10.1 (#2136)
+- fix(pytest): skip file-lock test on Windows (#2138)
+- Apply errback and callback when retry occurs (#2129)
+- Pin pre-commit to latest version 4.0.0 (Python 3.9+) (#2140)
+- Pin pre-commit to latest version 4.0.1 (#2144)
+- Add native delayed delivery API to kombu (#2128)
+- Add support for Google Pub/Sub as transport broker (#2147)
+- Update the transport options according to the retry policy (#2148)
+- Feature: urllib3 instead of curl (#2134)
+- Update mypy to 1.12.0 (#2149)
+- Prepare for (pre) release: v5.5.0rc1 (#2150)
+
 .. _version-5.4.2:
 
 5.4.2
diff --git a/README.rst b/README.rst
index 0a62e5a11..1b33752d4 100644
--- a/README.rst
+++ b/README.rst
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
 
 |build-status| |coverage| |license| |wheel| |pyversion| |pyimp| |downloads|
 
-:Version: 5.4.2
+:Version: 5.5.0rc1
 :Documentation: https://kombu.readthedocs.io/
 :Download: https://pypi.org/project/kombu/
 :Source: https://github.com/celery/kombu/
diff --git a/docs/includes/introduction.txt b/docs/includes/introduction.txt
index e5616908a..48f52488d 100644
--- a/docs/includes/introduction.txt
+++ b/docs/includes/introduction.txt
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-:Version: 5.4.2
+:Version: 5.5.0rc1
 :Web: https://kombu.readthedocs.io/
 :Download: https://pypi.org/project/kombu/
 :Source: https://github.com/celery/kombu/
diff --git a/kombu/__init__.py b/kombu/__init__.py
index 70acc3957..345adef3a 100644
--- a/kombu/__init__.py
+++ b/kombu/__init__.py
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
 from collections import namedtuple
 from typing import Any, cast
 
-__version__ = '5.4.2'
+__version__ = '5.5.0rc1'
 __author__ = 'Ask Solem'
 __contact__ = 'auvipy@gmail.com'
 __homepage__ = 'https://kombu.readthedocs.io'