The short version
Windows 10 stopped being a supported operating system on 14 October 2025. Microsoft offered consumers a one-year reprieve — the Extended Security Updates program, or ESU — which was due to run out in October 2026. In late June 2026, without a press release, a keynote or an email campaign, Microsoft moved that end date to 12 October 2027.
The change was made by editing Microsoft’s ESU documentation and adding an editor’s note dated 25 June 2026 to an existing Windows Experience Blog post. BleepingComputer and The Register both picked it up that week; The Register’s headline called it the most muted way imaginable. Anyone who was not reading Windows trade press in the last week of June has no particular reason to know it happened.
Four things follow from that, and they are the whole article:
- You have twelve more months than you were told. If you enrolled already, you need do nothing — existing enrolments carry through to the new date automatically. If you have not enrolled, you can still do it at any point up to the end date.
- In Australia it is AU$44.95 including tax, or free. Microsoft’s Australian page lists three paths: sync your PC settings at no additional cost, redeem 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or pay AU$44.95 once. One licence covers up to ten devices on the same Microsoft account.
- The free path has conditions people keep tripping over. It needs a Microsoft account with administrator rights — not a local account, not a child account — and reporting on the program says that account must sign in on the device at least once every 60 days or the device drops out.
- The apps now outlive the OS. Microsoft 365 Apps, OneDrive, Edge, WebView2 and Defender’s malware definitions are all committed through October 2028 — a full year past the operating system underneath them. Your machine will keep looking maintained after it stops being patched.
What actually changed in June
The original consumer offer was straightforward and widely reported: one extra year of critical and important security updates for Windows 10 version 22H2, ending in October 2026, after which personal devices had no further option. Microsoft was explicit at the time that this was a bridge, not a plan, and that the year was for migrating.
What changed is only the date. The program’s shape — security-only updates, the same three enrolment paths, the same 22H2 requirement, the same exclusion of domain-joined and MDM-managed machines — is untouched. Microsoft extended the runway by a year and did not draw attention to it.
Reasoning beyond the sources: it is not hard to see why. Worldwide, StatCounter had Windows 10 still on 29.83 per cent of desktop Windows in July 2026, nine months after support ended. That is not a rump of stragglers; that is close to a third of the installed base. A hard cutoff in October 2026 would have left an enormous number of unpatched, internet-connected machines in homes and small businesses, and Microsoft would have owned the consequences. Extending is the cheaper outcome. Announcing the extension loudly would undercut the migration message, so it was not announced loudly.
Five clocks, one machine
The most useful thing to understand about a Windows 10 PC in 2026 is that “is it still supported?” no longer has one answer. Different pieces of Microsoft software on the same machine have different end dates, and they do not line up.
| Windows 10 itself | Mainstream support ended 14 October 2025. No feature updates, no quality updates, no technical support from that date. |
|---|---|
| Consumer ESU | Critical and important security updates through 12 October 2027 for enrolled personal devices on version 22H2. Extended from October 2026 in June 2026. Enrolment stays open until the end date. |
| Commercial ESU | Sold per device through volume licensing at US$61 for Year One, with the price doubling each consecutive year, to a maximum of three years. Cumulative — buying Year Two means paying for Year One too. Included at no extra cost for Windows 10 virtual machines in Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop and several other Azure services. |
| Microsoft 365 Apps | Security updates on Windows 10 through 10 October 2028. Feature updates and Copilot support stop at Version 2608; devices then sit on 2608 receiving security fixes only. OneDrive desktop on 22H2 also runs to 10 October 2028. |
| Edge and WebView2 | Updates on Windows 10 22H2 until at least October 2028, and not conditional on being enrolled in ESU. |
| Microsoft Defender | Security intelligence updates — the malware definitions, not the engine and not the OS — continue on Windows 10 through October 2028. |
Read that table twice, because the trap is in the gap between rows two and four. From 13 October 2027, on current policy, a Windows 10 machine will have an operating system receiving no security patches at all, running a browser that still updates, an Office suite that still patches, and an antivirus that still downloads fresh definitions. Every visible signal will say the machine is being looked after. The kernel, the network stack and the driver model underneath will not have been touched in a year.
That is a worse failure mode than a clean cutoff, and it is our main reason for writing this now rather than in September 2027. Defender definitions catch known malware; they do not close a hole in the operating system. An updating browser is a hardened front door on a house whose walls have stopped being maintained.
What ESU is, precisely
Microsoft’s own documentation is unusually clear about the limits, and they are worth restating because “extended support” sounds like more than it is. ESU delivers critical and important security updates, as rated by the Microsoft Security Response Center. It explicitly does not include new features, customer-requested non-security fixes, design change requests, or general technical support. The only support attached to ESU is help with ESU itself — licence activation, installation, and regressions caused by an ESU update.
It also does nothing about compatibility. If a printer driver, a banking app, an accounting package or a game stops working on Windows 10 during 2027 because its vendor has moved on, ESU is not the thing that fixes that. Third-party support for Windows 10 is a separate set of decisions made by a few thousand separate companies, and most of them will take their cue from the operating system being out of support, not from your enrolment status.
How to enrol, and the conditions
Enrolment happens from Windows Update inside Settings, on a device that already has its current updates installed. The prerequisites Microsoft lists on its Australian page:
| Windows version | Windows 10 version 22H2 — Home, Pro, Pro Education or Pro for Workstations. Older Windows 10 builds are not eligible, and 22H2 must be fully patched first. |
|---|---|
| Account | A Microsoft account with administrator rights on the device. Local accounts are not eligible. Child accounts are not eligible. |
| Free path | Enrol at no additional cost by syncing your PC settings to the cloud through Windows Backup. This is the path most people will take, and it is the one that brings OneDrive into the picture — the free storage tier is 5GB. |
| Rewards path | Redeem 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points. Free if you already have the points; a slow way to get there if you do not. |
| Paid path | AU$44.95 including tax, one time, on the Australian page. Equivalent to US$30 plus tax elsewhere. |
| Devices covered | Up to ten, all tied to the same Microsoft account. |
| Not eligible | Devices joined to a domain or managed through MDM. Those are commercial ESU territory. |
| The 60-day rule | Reporting on the program says the enrolling Microsoft account must sign in on the device at least once every 60 days, or the device is removed from ESU and stops receiving updates. This is the condition most likely to catch a secondary or occasional-use machine. |
One regional wrinkle worth knowing if you read overseas coverage and wonder why it does not match: in the European Economic Area, after pressure from consumer groups, Microsoft dropped the settings-sync requirement, so EEA users get ESU free by signing in with a Microsoft account alone. Australia is not in that carve-out. Here, the no-cost route still means turning on Windows Backup.
Our view on which path to take, reasoning beyond the sources: if you are already signed into a Microsoft account and use OneDrive, the free path costs you nothing and is the obvious choice. If you deliberately run a local account — and plenty of people do, for good reasons — then AU$44.95 for up to ten devices is a fair price for not changing how your computer works, except that the paid path still requires a Microsoft account to enrol against. There is no version of this that keeps a purely local machine patched. That is a design decision, and it is the one most likely to annoy the people it is aimed at.
Australia by the numbers
Australia is further through this migration than the world average, and it is not close. StatCounter’s July 2026 figures for Australian desktop Windows put Windows 11 on 76.81 per cent and Windows 10 on 21.39 per cent, against 68.93 and 29.83 per cent worldwide. Windows 7, remarkably, is still on 1.72 per cent of Australian desktops — a higher share here than globally, and a useful reminder that a support deadline does not remove machines from the world.
Roughly one in five is still a lot of computers. Before the original deadline, the ABC reported estimates of more than six million Australian devices needing to move off Windows 10, and put the potential landfill contribution at around 12 million kilograms if they were discarded rather than reused. For context on the scale of the problem those devices land in, Australia already generates about 500,000 tonnes of e-waste a year — roughly 20kg per person against a global average nearer 7kg — and the Australian Council of Recycling expects that to rise close to 30 per cent by 2030. The reuse specialists quoted in that reporting were consistent on one point: refurbishment beats recycling, recycling beats the bin, and the device that never becomes waste is the one still in use.
Seen that way, the extra year Microsoft granted in June is the single largest e-waste intervention available to it, and it took no credit for it at all.
The gap in Australian law
There is an odd asymmetry here worth naming. Since 4 March 2026, Australia’s smart device security rules have required consumer connected products to ship without default passwords, with a vulnerability reporting channel, and — the relevant one — with a published support end date. A $60 smart plug sold in Australia has to tell you when its security updates stop.
Laptops and desktops are explicitly carved out of those rules. The most expensive and most security-critical computer in the house is the one with no obligation to publish a support end date, and it is the one whose support end date has now moved twice. We are not arguing the carve-out is wrong — general-purpose computers are a genuinely different regulatory problem, and the rules were aimed at cheap unattended devices for good reason. The point is narrower: if you want to know when your PC stops being patched, the law does not help you. You have to read a vendor’s documentation page, and notice when it is edited.
What to do with the extra year
The advice below is ours, applied to an Australian buyer, on the sourced picture above. It leans harder than usual toward keeping the machine you have, and that is deliberate: as we set out in our piece on the memory price crisis, this is a uniquely bad year to replace a working computer. Gartner has PC prices up around 17 per cent through 2026, and machines are shipping with less memory than the models they replace.
| Enrol now, decide later | Enrolment is free on the sync path, costs you nothing to hold, and does not block a Windows 11 upgrade later. There is no reason to wait and a real reason not to: a patch gap you did not intend is the worst outcome available here. |
|---|---|
| Check the Windows 11 requirement properly | The blockers are TPM 2.0, Secure Boot and a supported CPU generation — broadly 8th-generation Intel or Ryzen 2000 and newer. TPM and Secure Boot are frequently present but switched off in firmware, so a machine reported as ineligible is sometimes a BIOS setting away from eligible. Check that before concluding you need new hardware. |
| Treat registry bypasses as unsupported | Workarounds that force Windows 11 onto unsupported hardware exist and are widely documented. Microsoft’s position is that such installations are unsupported and may not receive updates. That is a materially worse security position than staying on Windows 10 with ESU, which is at least a supported configuration with a published end date. |
| Consider Linux for a second machine, not your only one | A desktop Linux distribution will run happily on hardware Windows 11 rejects, and is genuinely maintained and secure. It is the right answer for a spare laptop, a media box, or a machine used for browsing and documents. It is the wrong answer if your work depends on a specific Windows application — and switching in a hurry in October 2027 will go worse than switching deliberately during 2027 with a year of practice. |
| If you must replace, look at off-lease | Three-year-old corporate machines are Windows 11 eligible, were specified with memory that was cheap when they were built, and usually have upgradeable RAM. In a market where new machines cost more and ship with less, this is the value option — and it is the reuse outcome the recycling sector is asking for. |
| Diarise 12 October 2027, not October 2026 | And expect it to move again. Two dates have now been set for this program and one has already changed. Anyone planning to the published date rather than to their own migration timeline is planning to a number Microsoft can edit. |
What we could not establish
Three things. We could not find any Microsoft statement on whether the consumer program will be extended again beyond October 2027, and we would not read the June extension as a signal either way — commercial ESU is capped at three years, to October 2028, which is a plausible ceiling for the consumer program too, but that is our inference and not a Microsoft commitment. We could not verify from a Microsoft-published page the widely reported 60-day Microsoft account sign-in rule; it appears consistently in trade coverage and user reports, and we have cited it as reported rather than as documented. And we could not establish Australian enrolment numbers — Microsoft has not published how many devices are in the consumer ESU program in any market, so the 21.39 per cent figure above tells you how many machines are affected, not how many are protected.
The bottom line
If you are on Windows 10 and have not enrolled in ESU, do it this week. It is free on the settings-sync path, AU$44.95 otherwise, it covers up to ten machines, and it now buys you until 12 October 2027 rather than the October 2026 you were probably planning around.
Then use the year for the thing the year is for. The extension is not a reprieve for the machine; it is a reprieve for you, and its most valuable property is that it lets you make the next decision in a calmer market rather than in a panic six weeks before a deadline. The worst version of this story is the person who reads “another year”, does nothing for eleven months, and then buys a laptop in the same month as everybody else.
And keep one date in your head above all the others: October 2028, when Office, Edge and Defender stop too. That is the real end of Windows 10 as a maintained platform. Everything between now and then is a managed retreat.
Sources
Dates, prices and figures above are drawn from these sources, captured 29 August 2026:
- Microsoft — Windows 10 Consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU), Australian edition: the 12 October 2027 end date, the three enrolment paths, the AU$44.95 including tax one-time price, the Windows 10 version 22H2 Home / Pro / Pro Education / Pro for Workstations requirement, the administrator Microsoft account condition, the exclusion of child accounts, and the ten-device licence.
- Microsoft — End of support for Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7: the 14 October 2025 end-of-support date and the statement that enrolled devices continue to receive critical and important security updates through 12 October 2027.
- Microsoft Learn — Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for Windows 10: the version 22H2 prerequisite, the exclusions (no new features, no non-security fixes, no design change requests, no general technical support), the commercial price of US$61 per device for Year One doubling each consecutive year to a maximum of three, the cumulative purchase rule, and the Azure and Windows 365 entitlements.
- Microsoft Learn — Windows 10 end of support and Microsoft 365 Apps (updated 27 July 2026): security updates for Microsoft 365 Apps on Windows 10 ending 10 October 2028, feature updates and Copilot support stopping at Version 2608, OneDrive desktop updates on 22H2 through 10 October 2028, and the limits placed on support incidents.
- BleepingComputer — Microsoft quietly extends free Windows 10 ESU support to October 2027 (25 June 2026): the extension itself, the editor’s note and documentation edit as the only communication, the confirmation that existing enrolments carry over automatically with no action required, the EEA sign-in difference, and the exclusion of domain-joined and MDM-managed devices.
- The Register — Microsoft extends extended updates for Windows 10 in the most muted way imaginable (26 June 2026): independent confirmation of the extension and of how quietly it was made.
- Microsoft Tech Community — End of Windows 10 support: what Defender customers need to know: security intelligence updates for Microsoft Defender Antivirus on Windows 10 continuing through October 2028.
- Thurrott.com — Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 to be supported until October 2028: Edge and the WebView2 Runtime receiving updates on Windows 10 22H2 until at least October 2028, independent of ESU enrolment.
- StatCounter — Desktop Windows version market share, Australia (July 2026): Windows 11 on 76.81 per cent, Windows 10 on 21.39 per cent and Windows 7 on 1.72 per cent of Australian desktop Windows.
- StatCounter — Desktop Windows version market share, worldwide (July 2026): Windows 11 on 68.93 per cent and Windows 10 on 29.83 per cent. StatCounter measures page views on participating sites rather than counting devices, so treat both figures as an indicator, not a census.
- ABC News — ‘Built-in obsolescence’ creates 500,000-tonne e-waste problem (10 February 2025): Australia’s roughly 500,000 tonnes of annual e-waste rising toward 657,000 tonnes by 2030, about 20kg per person against a global average near 7kg, the estimate of more than six million Australian devices needing to move off Windows 10 and around 12 million kilograms of potential landfill, and comments from Greenbox, the Australian Council of Recycling and Green Collect on reuse ahead of recycling. Published before the ESU program was extended, so its deadline references are to the original timetable.
- Windows Central — Windows 10 end of life and ESU FAQ: the reported requirement to sign in with the enrolling Microsoft account at least once every 60 days to remain in the program. Cited as reported; we could not locate this condition on a Microsoft-published page.
- Windows Latest — You will still need a Microsoft account for Windows 10 ESU in Europe (26 September 2025): the European Economic Area carve-out removing the Windows Backup settings-sync requirement while retaining the Microsoft account requirement.