diff --git a/CHANGELOG b/CHANGELOG
index af3ab792bf5..b0b93226c21 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG
+++ b/CHANGELOG
@@ -16,6 +16,7 @@
  * Speed up applying `html_cva()` recipes that resolve to classes already seen
  * Fix a class marked safe for `html_attr` not being considered safe in `html` and `html_attr_relaxed` contexts
  * Add a way to mark a `Twig\Markup` instance as safe for some escaping strategies only
+ * Speed up the `html` escaping strategy for long strings
 
 # 3.30.0 (2026-09-25)
 
diff --git a/src/Runtime/EscaperRuntime.php b/src/Runtime/EscaperRuntime.php
index a2b0df06d37..410a38f0b50 100644
--- a/src/Runtime/EscaperRuntime.php
+++ b/src/Runtime/EscaperRuntime.php
@@ -29,6 +29,8 @@ final class EscaperRuntime implements RuntimeExtensionInterface
         'html_attr_relaxed' => ['html'],
     ];
 
+    private const HTML_SPECIAL_CHARS = ['&' => '&amp;', '"' => '&quot;', '\'' => '&#039;', '<' => '&lt;', '>' => '&gt;'];
+
     /** @var array<string, callable(string, string): string> */
     private $escapers = [];
 
@@ -157,6 +159,11 @@ public function escape($string, string $strategy = 'html', ?string $charset = nu
                 // see https://www.php.net/htmlspecialchars
 
                 if ('UTF-8' === $charset) {
+                    // Up to PHP 8.6, htmlspecialchars() decodes every character (see https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/23957): on long valid UTF-8 strings, replacing these characters with strtr() is faster
+                    if (\PHP_VERSION_ID < 80700 && \strlen($string) > 32 && preg_match('//u', $string)) {
+                        return strtr($string, self::HTML_SPECIAL_CHARS);
+                    }
+
                     return htmlspecialchars($string, \ENT_QUOTES | \ENT_SUBSTITUTE, 'UTF-8');
                 }
 
diff --git a/tests/Runtime/EscaperRuntimeTest.php b/tests/Runtime/EscaperRuntimeTest.php
index db84d9b7652..c847a3de0c6 100644
--- a/tests/Runtime/EscaperRuntimeTest.php
+++ b/tests/Runtime/EscaperRuntimeTest.php
@@ -174,6 +174,25 @@ public function testHtmlEscapingConvertsSpecialChars(): void
         }
     }
 
+    /**
+     * @dataProvider provideLongStrings
+     */
+    #[DataProvider('provideLongStrings')]
+    public function testHtmlEscapingLongStringsLikeHtmlspecialchars(string $string): void
+    {
+        $this->assertSame(htmlspecialchars($string, \ENT_QUOTES | \ENT_SUBSTITUTE, 'UTF-8'), (new EscaperRuntime())->escape($string, 'html'));
+    }
+
+    public static function provideLongStrings(): iterable
+    {
+        $padding = str_repeat('padding ', 5);
+
+        yield 'nothing to escape' => [$padding];
+        yield 'special chars' => [$padding.'<a href="#">Tom & Jerry\'s</a>'];
+        yield 'multibyte chars' => [$padding.'éàü 😀'];
+        yield 'invalid UTF-8' => [$padding."\xC3\x28 \xFF \xED\xA0\x80 &"];
+    }
+
     public function testHtmlAttributeEscapingConvertsSpecialChars(): void
     {
         foreach ($this->htmlAttrSpecialChars as $key => $value) {