diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index b470000e63..e752f095cf 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
 4.0-beta5
+ * Increase the cqlsh version number (CASSANDRA-16509)
  * Fix the CQL generated for the views.where_clause column when some identifiers require quoting (CASSANDRA-16479)
  * Send FAILED_SESSION_MSG on shutdown and on in-progress repairs during startup (CASSANDRA-16425)
  * Reinstate removed ApplicationState padding (CASSANDRA-16484)
diff --git a/bin/cqlsh.py b/bin/cqlsh.py
index 6c8ff3ceac..d12c504627 100755
--- a/bin/cqlsh.py
+++ b/bin/cqlsh.py
@@ -45,7 +45,7 @@ UTF8 = 'utf-8'
 CP65001 = 'cp65001'  # Win utf-8 variant
 
 description = "CQL Shell for Apache Cassandra"
-version = "5.0.1"
+version = "6.0.0"
 
 readline = None
 try: