Author: Dan Briggs | Published: 20 August 2026 | Reading time: 14 minutes
Executive summary: Microsoft has shipped the last feature update for Microsoft 365 Apps on Windows 10. Version 2608, released in August 2026, is the final feature release for Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint on the older operating system: devices stay on that build and receive security fixes only until 10 October 2028. Separately, from 15 August 2026 the OneDrive sync app stopped receiving any updates at all, including security fixes, on Windows 10 version 21H2 and earlier. Meanwhile the first year of paid commercial Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows 10 itself runs out on 13 October 2026, and year two doubles the price to US$122 per device. Around one in five Australian Windows desktops still ran Windows 10 in July 2026, so plenty of businesses now face a genuine decision, not a distant one. This whitepaper sets out exactly what changed, what it costs to stay, what it costs to move, and a practical plan to sort your fleet before the October renewal point.
What Microsoft changed in August
Microsoft has been signalling since mid-2025 that Windows 10 would stop receiving new Microsoft 365 features, and in August 2026 the switch actually flipped. Version 2608 of Microsoft 365 Apps is the last release that brings new features to Windows 10 devices. Once your update channel reaches 2608, that is where your Office apps stay. They keep working, and they keep receiving security patches until 10 October 2028, but every new capability Microsoft builds from here on, from ribbon improvements to new Copilot tools, ships to Windows 11 only.
The freeze does not land on every business on the same day. It depends on which update channel your Microsoft 365 Apps are configured to use:
- Current Channel (the default for most small businesses, and for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family): frozen now, as of August 2026.
- Monthly Enterprise Channel: receives its final feature update on 13 October 2026.
- Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel: receives its final feature update on 12 January 2027.
If you are not sure which channel you are on, open Word, go to File, then Account, and look under About Word. The channel name and build number are listed there. Most of the small and mid-sized businesses we support run Current Channel, which means for them the freeze is not coming. It has arrived.
Independent Microsoft-watchers covered the change in detail in August 2026, including Office Watch and Thurrott, and both make the same point we make to clients: this is not Office breaking on Windows 10. It is Office being locked in place there, deliberately, to move the remaining holdouts to Windows 11.
The OneDrive cutoff has already happened
The part of this story that deserves more attention than it is getting is OneDrive. From 15 August 2026, the OneDrive sync app no longer receives feature updates, bug fixes or security updates on devices running Windows 10 version 21H2 or earlier, per Microsoft message centre notice MC1426708, first published on 13 July 2026. Devices on Windows 10 22H2 keep receiving OneDrive sync updates until 10 October 2028, in line with the Office security patch window. The Register covered the change when it was announced.
Note the difference in severity. The Office freeze stops new features but keeps security fixes flowing. The OneDrive cutoff on pre-22H2 builds stops everything, security fixes included. Microsoft’s guidance is blunt: the sync client on those machines may keep running, but the company no longer guarantees that syncing will keep working, and it will not patch the client if a vulnerability turns up.
For a business, an unpatched, unsupported sync agent with delegated access to your company’s SharePoint and OneDrive data is not a neutral piece of software. It is a standing risk sitting between your file store and an operating system build that itself left support years ago. If you have any machine in the building still on Windows 10 21H2 or older, treat it as a priority regardless of what you decide about the rest of the fleet. Check the build by pressing the Windows key plus R, typing winver, and reading the version line. Anything below 22H2 should be updated to 22H2 immediately if the hardware allows it, or scheduled for replacement if it does not.
There is a second-order risk here that catches businesses out. Many fleets use OneDrive’s known folder move, which silently redirects Desktop and Documents into OneDrive so that saving to My Documents is really saving to the cloud. That redirection depends entirely on the sync client behaving. If an unsupported client degrades, staff will keep saving files exactly as they always have, the files will land only on the local disk, and nobody notices until the machine dies or a colleague cannot find yesterday’s quote. Sync failure on a shared PC is rarely reported because nobody thinks of themselves as its owner. It just becomes the computer that loses things.
The ESU maze: a free year for households, an invoice for businesses
Windows 10 itself reached end of support on 14 October 2025. Since then the only way to keep receiving Windows security updates has been the Extended Security Updates program, and in July 2026 Microsoft complicated the picture by extending it. Consumer ESU coverage now runs to 12 October 2027, a full extra year at no cost for enrolled devices, as Office Watch reported on 14 July 2026. Households can enrol free by syncing PC settings with a Microsoft account, by redeeming 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or with a one-time US$30 payment.
That extension generated a wave of headlines along the lines of Windows 10 being safe until 2027, and we have had several clients ask whether the pressure is off. For business fleets, it is not, for three reasons.
First, the free consumer pathway is built for personal devices signed in with a Microsoft account. Machines joined to a company domain or managed through Entra ID and Intune sit in the commercial ESU program, which is a paid subscription: US$61 per device for year one, doubling each year for a maximum of three years. Year one of commercial coverage ends on 13 October 2026. Year two, running to October 2027, costs US$122 per device, roughly A$190 before any reseller margin. Year three doubles again. A business that rides ESU to the program’s end in October 2028 will have paid about US$427 per device just to stand still.
Second, ESU covers the operating system only. It does not restart feature updates for Microsoft 365 Apps, it does not restore OneDrive support on pre-22H2 builds, and it does not make a machine eligible for anything Microsoft ships next. We covered the gap between what the extension headlines implied and what business fleets actually get in our July piece, Microsoft’s free Windows 10 extension won’t save your business fleet, and the August app freeze has only widened it.
Third, the July 2026 Microsoft 365 price rise means you are now paying more for the subscription whose new features your Windows 10 machines cannot receive. Microsoft’s own packaging and pricing FAQ confirms the increase applied to Business Basic, Business Standard and the enterprise suites from 1 July 2026. Every month a Windows 10 device stays in service, the share of your subscription spend that device can actually use shrinks.
What a frozen Office actually means for your business
It is tempting to file this change under cosmetic. Spreadsheets still calculate, invoices still merge, email still sends. For some machines that logic holds, and we will say so plainly in the cost section below. But there are four practical consequences worth weighing before you decide the freeze does not matter.
Feature drift inside your own team
From this month, a business running a mix of Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines is running two diverging versions of Office. Staff on Windows 11 will see new functions, new collaboration behaviour and new Copilot capabilities that colleagues on Windows 10 do not have. In our experience the support tickets this generates are rarely logged as version drift. They arrive as one person insisting a feature exists and another insisting it does not, or a shared workbook behaving differently on two desks. Multiply that by two years, because the frozen state lasts until October 2028, and the hidden cost is real staff time, not theory.
The Copilot line now runs through your hardware
Microsoft was explicit that new Copilot tools are among the features Windows 10 devices will not receive. If your business is trialling Copilot, or you took up the recent in-product trial offers we covered in our August analysis of the Copilot in 30 trial, note that seats assigned to staff on Windows 10 desktops will fall progressively behind the product you are paying for. Licensing Copilot for a Windows 10 fleet is buying tickets to a venue the bus no longer stops at.
Security posture is now a two-layer question
A Windows 10 machine with paid ESU and Microsoft 365 security patches is not unprotected, and it would be scaremongering to claim otherwise. But its protection is now conditional on subscriptions and cut-off dates stacking correctly: OS patches until your ESU lapses, Office patches until October 2028, OneDrive patches only on 22H2, browser support on its own clock. Each layer has a different expiry, and a lapse in any one of them opens a gap. That is exactly the kind of quiet configuration risk that endpoint monitoring exists to catch, which is why we point clients to detection and response tooling on ageing fleets in particular. Our explainer on why antivirus alone isn’t enough covers what that looks like in practice.
Insurers and auditors read lifecycle dates too
Cyber insurance proposal forms in Australia increasingly ask whether all systems are vendor-supported and patched. A Windows 10 device with current ESU can accurately be described as receiving security updates, but a pre-22H2 device running an unsupported OneDrive client cannot. If your renewal lands between now and October, check what you are attesting to before you sign it, because a claims assessor will.
Where Australian fleets really stand
The national numbers say this is a minority problem, but a big minority. StatCounter measured Windows 10 at 21.39 per cent of Australian desktop Windows use in July 2026, against 76.81 per cent for Windows 11, with a stubborn 1.72 per cent still on Windows 7. One desktop in five is a lot of machines to be sitting on a frozen productivity suite.
The averages also hide where those machines live. Across the fleets we manage in Sydney, Brisbane and Central West NSW, the Windows 10 stragglers are rarely anyone’s primary laptop. They cluster in shared, workhorse roles: the reception PC at a Brookvale trades office, point-of-sale and back-office machines in hospitality venues, the workshop terminal that drives a label printer, the donations and volunteer-roster desk at a not-for-profit. These are precisely the machines with no owner to advocate for them at budget time, and precisely the machines where a quietly failing OneDrive sync goes unnoticed until a document someone swears they saved is not where it should be. When we audit a client environment, the shared devices are where we look first, and they are where the pre-22H2 builds turn up.
Distance adds a wrinkle our metro clients do not face. For businesses in Orange, Bathurst and Dubbo, a hardware refresh is not a same-day errand: stock allocation, freight and an on-site visit put realistic lead times at weeks, not days, and the October to December quarter fills quickly every year. Regional businesses that want replacement machines deployed before the 13 October ESU renewal date should be ordering in September, not phoning in the second week of October. City businesses have more slack, but the pattern from the Windows 7 retirement in 2020 was the same everywhere: the quarter before the deadline was quiet, the fortnight after it was chaos.
October is also shaping up as a pile-up of Microsoft deadlines beyond Windows 10. Exchange Web Services stops working against Exchange Online on 1 October 2026, which we unpacked in our EWS whitepaper, and Exchange 2016 and 2019 servers stop receiving updates the same month. If your IT calendar for spring currently says business as usual, it is worth a second look.
Your pre-October action plan
Here is the sequence we are running with our own clients. None of it requires a project team; most of it is a few hours of stocktake followed by decisions per machine.
| Step | Action | Why it matters | Do it by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Inventory every Windows device: OS version and build (winver), Microsoft 365 update channel (File, Account), age and warranty status. | You cannot triage what you have not counted. The build number decides OneDrive support; the channel decides when the Office freeze lands. | End of August 2026 |
| 2 | Update any Windows 10 machine below 22H2 to 22H2, or isolate it if it cannot update. | Pre-22H2 builds lost all OneDrive sync updates, including security fixes, on 15 August 2026. | Immediately |
| 3 | Run a Windows 11 readiness check (TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, supported CPU) on every Windows 10 device. | Splits the fleet into free upgrades and hardware replacements, which have very different costs and lead times. | First week of September |
| 4 | Upgrade the eligible machines to Windows 11 in scheduled batches. | The upgrade is free, restores the feature pipeline, and removes the device from every ESU calculation. | September to early October |
| 5 | Decide per ineligible machine: replace, retire, or renew commercial ESU for year two. | Year one ESU coverage ends 13 October 2026; year two costs US$122 per device. | Before 13 October 2026 |
| 6 | Order replacement hardware early, especially outside the capitals. | Regional freight and scheduling make October orders a December delivery in bad years. | September |
| 7 | Check your cyber insurance attestations and client-facing security claims against the new support reality. | Unsupported components on the network can undermine a claim when you most need it paid. | Before your next renewal |
One deliberate omission from that table: registry workarounds to force Windows 11 onto unsupported hardware. They exist, they are popular in hobbyist forums, and we do not deploy them for business fleets. Microsoft does not guarantee updates on bypassed installs, which simply trades one unsupported configuration for another with extra steps.
The money question: pay ESU again or replace the machine
The arithmetic per device is now easy to lay out. Commercial ESU year two is US$122, call it A$190, and buys twelve months of OS security patches and nothing else: no new Office features, no Copilot, no restored OneDrive support on old builds, no warranty on the ageing hardware underneath. Year three doubles again to US$244. Against that, a capable business desktop or laptop lands somewhere between A$1,200 and A$2,200, comes with a warranty, runs Windows 11 at no licence cost, and puts the device back on the feature pipeline for the life of the hardware.
For a machine you intend to keep past next year, ESU is the more expensive path in any calculation that values staff time above zero, because you pay the fee and still face the replacement later, plus the drift costs in the meantime. Where ESU year two makes defensible sense is narrow: a device tied to specialist equipment that only certifies on Windows 10, a site scheduled for closure or refit before October 2027, or a genuine single-purpose terminal that touches no shared documents. We run these cases through the same lens as any end-of-life system: what does the machine do, what breaks if it is compromised, and what does twelve more months actually buy you. Talk to your accountant about timing as well, since the tax treatment of a refresh can shift the comparison and depreciation rules change; we will keep the IT recommendation and the tax advice in their proper lanes.
If the fleet is large, stagger it. A business with twenty Windows 10 machines does not need twenty new PCs in one invoice: upgrade the Windows 11-eligible units for free this quarter, replace the customer-facing and document-heavy machines next, and let the true single-purpose terminals run out their ESU year. Several of our clients are also using the deadline to rethink ownership entirely, moving reception and point-of-sale roles onto leased hardware with a fixed refresh cycle so this class of decision never lands in one lump again.
The blunt bottom line: for most Australian businesses still carrying Windows 10 devices, this is the quarter to finish the migration, not to buy another year of standing still. The freeze removed the last reason to believe waiting was free.
Where to get help
All IT Services runs Windows 11 readiness assessments and staged migrations for businesses across Sydney, the Northern Beaches, Brisbane, Melbourne and Central West NSW, including fleet inventory, hardware supply, after-hours cutovers and the ESU edge cases. If you want the stocktake in step one done for you this month, with a per-device recommendation you can put straight into the budget, call us on 1300 425 548 or get in touch online. The October deadlines do not move; the queue in front of them does.
Frequently asked questions
Will Word, Excel and Outlook stop working on Windows 10?
No. Microsoft 365 Apps keep working on Windows 10 and keep receiving security updates until 10 October 2028. What stopped in August 2026 is new features: devices stay on Version 2608, and everything Microsoft builds after that ships to Windows 11 only.
We pay for Extended Security Updates. Does that keep Office up to date too?
No. ESU covers the Windows 10 operating system only. The Office feature freeze applies to every Windows 10 device regardless of ESU status, and OneDrive sync updates have already ended on builds older than 22H2.
Can our business use the free Windows 10 extension to October 2027?
Generally not. The free enrolment paths are consumer options for personal devices using a Microsoft account. Devices joined to a company domain or managed through Entra ID need commercial ESU, which costs US$122 per device for the year ending October 2027.
Our Windows 10 PCs cannot upgrade to Windows 11. What should we do first?
Confirm each machine is on Windows 10 22H2 so OneDrive keeps receiving updates, then price replacement against another year of ESU. For most general-purpose machines replacement wins; keep ESU for the narrow cases such as hardware tied to specialist Windows 10-only equipment.
Which update channel are we on, and why does it matter?
Open any Office app and check File, then Account: the channel is listed under the About section. Current Channel devices froze in August 2026, Monthly Enterprise Channel freezes on 13 October 2026, and Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel freezes on 12 January 2027.