diff --git a/HISTORY.md b/HISTORY.md
index bbe6dd425b..6676a82e30 100644
--- a/HISTORY.md
+++ b/HISTORY.md
@@ -6,6 +6,22 @@ dev
 
 - \[Short description of non-trivial change.\]
 
+
+2.31.1 (2024-05-20)
+-------------------
+
+**Dependencies**
+
+- `charset_normalizer` and `chardet` are now optional dependencies of Requests.
+  The default behavior will degrade to using `utf-8` when decoding strings in
+  the `Response.text()` API if `Response.encoding` is not set.
+
+  This will not affect the default installation of Requests but enables
+  downstream repackaging to remove these dependencies if they're undesired.
+  Default installations of Requests will still use `charset_normalizer` unless
+  `chardet` is present.
+
+
 2.31.0 (2023-05-22)
 -------------------
 
diff --git a/requests/__version__.py b/requests/__version__.py
index 5063c3f8ee..5fe711d46e 100644
--- a/requests/__version__.py
+++ b/requests/__version__.py
@@ -5,8 +5,8 @@
 __title__ = "requests"
 __description__ = "Python HTTP for Humans."
 __url__ = "https://requests.readthedocs.io"
-__version__ = "2.31.0"
-__build__ = 0x023100
+__version__ = "2.31.1"
+__build__ = 0x023101
 __author__ = "Kenneth Reitz"
 __author_email__ = "me@kennethreitz.org"
 __license__ = "Apache 2.0"