Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 10 on 14 October 2025. Since that date there have been no security patches, no reliability fixes and no help from Microsoft when something breaks.
The machines did not stop working, which is the part that catches people out. A Windows 10 PC today boots, prints, opens Outlook and looks exactly as it did in 2024. Nothing on screen tells the person using it that the flaws found since last October are still open, and will stay open.
The deadline moved, and Microsoft did not say so
When end of support was announced, home users were offered one extra year of security updates through a program called Extended Security Updates. That year was due to run out in October 2026.
It no longer does. Microsoft's own consumer ESU page and its end of support page both now give the date as 12 October 2027. There was no announcement. The date simply changed on the page.
So the pressure is genuinely lower than it was, and a business that has been putting this off has not run out of road. What it has done is start paying interest, because every month on an unpatched machine is a month of accumulated exposure that patching later does not undo.
If you enrolled a machine under the original one-year offer, open Settings › Update & Security › Windows Update and check which date it now shows.
Option one: upgrade the machine to Windows 11
On hardware that qualifies, this is the cleanest answer and there is no licence cost for the upgrade itself.
The catch is what qualifies. Windows 11 wants TPM 2.0, UEFI with Secure Boot, a processor on Microsoft's supported list, 4 GB of memory and 64 GB of storage. The processor list is the one that fails people. Plenty of machines bought in 2017 and 2018 are quick enough for the work being asked of them and are still refused, and no amount of memory fixes that.
To check a single machine, open Settings › Update & Security › Windows Update. If the upgrade is available it is offered there. If it is not, the PC Health Check app will name the specific requirement that failed, which is worth knowing before you decide the machine is finished. TPM is sometimes present and switched off in firmware, and turning it on costs nothing.
Across a fleet, checking machine by machine stops being sensible somewhere around the tenth one. It is faster to pull the hardware inventory and sort it into three piles: upgrade now, cannot upgrade, and not worth upgrading.
Option two: pay for another two years of updates
Extended Security Updates buys time rather than solving anything. It delivers the critical and important security patches and nothing else. No feature updates, no non-security bug fixes, and no technical support from Microsoft.
For a home PC or a small office running standalone machines, there are three ways in, and all three give identical coverage to 12 October 2027:
- No cost, if you turn on settings sync. Windows Backup has to be syncing your PC settings to a Microsoft account.
- 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, if you have them.
- A one-off US$30, in local currency plus tax.
One licence covers up to ten devices, so a small office paying the $30 is paying it once, not ten times.
Before you plan around it, the prerequisites rule out more machines than people expect:
- The PC has to be on Windows 10 version 22H2 with its updates installed. Anything older has to be brought current first.
- The editions covered are Home, Pro, Pro Education and Pro for Workstations.
- You have to sign in with a Microsoft account holding administrator rights. A local account will not do it, and neither will a child account.
- Devices joined to an Active Directory domain, or enrolled in an MDM, are excluded. Machines registered to Microsoft Entra are fine.
- Kiosk-mode devices are excluded.
To enrol, go to Settings › Update & Security › Windows Update and look for Enrol now. If it is not there, one of the conditions above is the reason.
If your machines are domain-joined or managed
This is where a lot of small businesses discover they are on the wrong path. The consumer route is closed to managed devices, and the business route is a different product at a different price.
Commercial ESU is bought through volume licensing at US$61 per device for year one, and the price doubles every year after that, to a maximum of three years. It is also cumulative: buying into year two means paying for year one as well, whether or not you used it. Year one started in November 2025, so a business enrolling now is already buying a year it has partly spent.
There is one exception worth knowing. Windows 10 virtual machines running in Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop or Azure carry ESU at no extra cost.
Option three: replace the hardware
For a machine that cannot take Windows 11 and is already five or six years old, paying to extend Windows 10 twice over is usually money spent on a device you will replace anyway.
The number that decides it is not the price of the new PC. It is the hours someone loses to the old one, plus the cost of the incident you are underwriting by running it unpatched. A single ransomware event on an unsupported machine costs more than the fleet.
What we would suggest
Take the two years. Then use them.
Concretely, and in this order:
Upgrade everything that can be upgraded, now. It is free, it takes an afternoon per machine, and it shrinks the problem to the machines that actually have one. Most fleets have fewer genuinely stuck PCs than the owner assumes.
Enrol the rest in ESU straight away, before you decide their future. The updates are worth having while you make the decision, and enrolling late does not backdate the patches you missed. Take the free settings-sync route if the machine allows it. Check first whether the device is domain-joined or in Intune, because that answer decides which program you are even eligible for.
Set a real date for the stuck machines, inside the two years. October 2027 will arrive, and the last extension is not a promise of another one. Replacing eight PCs across eighteen months is a budget line. Replacing eight PCs in the week before a deadline is an emergency.
Deal with anything holding a machine hostage. Usually it is one piece of old software that will not run on Windows 11, or a printer or machine-control device with no newer driver. That is a solvable problem given a year and an unsolvable one given a fortnight, which is the real argument for starting now.
If you would rather not work out which of your machines can take Windows 11 and which cannot, that is a job we do. Send us the list, or ring 1300 561 349 and we will go through it with you.