As per the Microsoft documentation - A Subscriber to a transactional publication can be any version within two versions of the Publisher version. For example:
a SQL Server 2012 (11.x) Publisher can have SQL Server 2014 (12.x) and SQL Server 2016 (13.x) Subscribers;
and
a SQL Server 2016 (13.x) Publisher can have SQL Server 2014 (12.x) and SQL Server 2012 (11.x) Subscribers.
But the subscription I am trying to create from
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (SP3) (KB3072779) - 11.0.6020.0 (X64) to Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (SP2-CU12) (KB4536648) - 13.0.5698.0 (X64)
is failing and here is the error message I receive -
The selected subscriber does not satisfy the minimum version compatibility level of the selected publication.
Are these versions not compatible?