Office apps on Windows 10 are no longer tied to its October 2025 end-of-support date

Windows 10 will stop getting free security updates on October 14, 2025.

For most users, Windows 10 will stop receiving security updates and other official support from Microsoft on October 14, 2025, about five months from today. Until recently, Microsoft had also said that users running the Microsoft Office apps on Windows 10 would also lose support on that date, whether they were using the continually updated Microsoft 365 versions of those apps or the buy-once-own-forever versions included in Office 2021 or Office 2024.

Microsoft has recently tweaked this policy, however (as seen by The Verge). Now, Windows 10 users of the Microsoft 365 apps will still be eligible to receive software updates and support through October of 2028, "in the interest of maintaining your security while you upgrade to Windows 11." Microsoft is taking a similar approach to Windows Defender malware definitions, which will be offered to Windows 10 users "through at least October 2028."

The policy is a change from a few months ago, when Microsoft insisted that Office apps running on Windows 10 would become officially unsupported on October 14. The perpetually licensed versions of Office will be supported in accordance with Microsoft's "Fixed Lifecycle Policy," which guarantees support and security updates for a fixed number of years after a software product's initial release. For Office 2021, this means Windows 10 users will get support through October of 2026; for Office 2024, this should extend to October of 2029.

Some Microsoft support sites still list the old end-of-support dates for Office apps running on Windows 10. We've contacted Microsoft to see whether these sites will be updated to match the new dates.

Microsoft is likely extending this Office support date and the Windows Defender definitions to help cover people who buy into the Extended Security Updates program for Windows 10, which will allow individuals and institutions to stay on Windows 10 past the official public end-of-support date. Businesses and other institutions will be able to buy between one and three extra years of security updates, with costs that steadily increase for each year of updates. Individuals will be able to buy a single extra year of updates for a flat $30 per PC.

For people who aren't paying for extra Windows 10 updates, Microsoft has stayed firmly committed to both Windows 10's end-of-support date and Windows 11's minimum system requirements, which will prevent many active Windows 10 systems from upgrading to the newer operating system. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Microsoft's solution is that these people should buy a new PC entirely; the company declared 2025 "the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh" back in January.

It's possible to install and run Windows 11 on older "unsupported" PCs, and the day-to-day experience is often indistinguishable from running the software on a "supported" PC. But there are additional hoops to jump through when you're installing and upgrading the OS that may keep most non-technical users from wanting to give it a try.

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