Laravel is an open-source PHP framework for building maintainable web applications and APIs. It provides an expressive, convention-driven foundation so developers can focus on application behavior instead of repeatedly solving common infrastructure problems.

It includes routing, dependency injection, Eloquent database access, Blade templates, authentication, validation, queues, caching, testing, and scheduled tasks. In an interview, describe it as a full-stack framework that can render web pages, expose APIs, run background jobs, and integrate with databases and external services.