Microsoft has officially ended support for its most popular OS ever. Here’s what to do with your Windows 10 PCs that fail Microsoft’s Windows 11 compatibility tests.
Windows 10 support officially ended on Oct. 14, 2025.
Consumers have free options to extend updates for up to a year.
Doing nothing is not a safe option.
After more than a decade, with installations on well over 1 billion PCs, Windows 10 has finally reached its official end-of-support date.
The official deadline was Oct. 14, 2025. As of that date, PCs running Windows 10 will no longer receive monthly security updates. If you have an older laptop or desktop PC that doesn’t pass the compatibility checks for Windows 11, Microsoft will block you from upgrading through Windows Update, and they will encourage you to buy a new PC instead.
But you have other alternatives, including several ways to continue getting security updates at no cost for an extra year — until October 2026. There’s no time to procrastinate, though — if you’re responsible for one or more Windows 10 PCs that fail Microsoft’s Windows 11 compatibility tests, you need to choose one of the five options listed in this article.
Even if you and your business aren’t affected by this deadline, it’s likely that you have friends and family members who own older PCs that are still perfectly functional but can’t be upgraded to Windows 11. They’ve probably been ignoring warning messages for a few months now, but those messages will become more insistent now that the support deadline has passed. You can help them out by sending them a link to this article. 1. Sign up for extended security updates
Microsoft will continue developing security updates for Windows 10 for three years after the official end-of-support date, but they won’t be free for everyone. Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for Windows 10 will be available on a subscription basis for consumers and businesses.
How much are these paid-for updates going to cost? That depends.
Consumers have the option to receive security updates for one additional year after the end-of-support date, with the deadline pushing out to October 2026. The list price for that subscription is $30 a year, but you can cut the cost to zero by using Microsoft Rewards points (you can earn enough points by using the Bing search engine for a few days). You can also qualify for free updates by using the Windows Backup tool. For details, see How to get Windows 10 extended security updates for free.
This is the obvious choice if you simply want to keep using Windows 10 without interruption. Just be aware that the consumer ESU subscription expires after one year and cannot be renewed. At the end of that year, you’ll have an unsupported PC once again, so make sure you use the time between now and then to figure out your exit strategy for October 2026.
ESU subscriptions for Enterprise and Education deployments are only available as part of a volume licensing purchase. For details, see this support article.
If you’re an administrator at an educational institution with computers running Windows 10 Education edition, you’re in luck. You can purchase extended updates for up to three years, and the cost will be a mere pittance: $1 per machine for the first year, $2 for the second year, and $4 for the third and final year, taking you all the way to October 2028.
IT pros who manage a fleet of business PCs aren’t so lucky and will need to pay dearly to stick with Windows 10. A license for the Extended Security Updates program is sold as a per-device subscription. For the first year, the cost is $61 per PC. For year two, the price doubles, and it doubles again for year three. Do the math, and the cost is staggering: a three-year ESU subscription will cost $61 + $122 + $244, for a total of $427. 2. Buy a new PC (or rent a virtual PC)
Microsoft and its partners would like you to replace that unsupported hardware with a new PC. You might even be tempted by one of the shiny new Copilot+ PCs, with their dedicated neural processing units, or maybe a powerful gaming PC. But throwing away a perfectly good computer seems wasteful, and it’s not an option if you’re hanging on to Windows 10 because you have mission-critical software or an expensive hardware device that’s incompatible with Windows 11.
