Microsoft’s free Windows 10 extension won’t save your business fleet

Microsoft has quietly handed Windows 10 another year of free security updates — the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program now runs to October 2027 instead of 2026, as reported by BleepingComputer. Handy if you’ve got a Windows 10 laptop at home. Not the win it looks like if you’re running a business.

Read the fine print and the free extension explicitly excludes devices joined to an Active Directory domain, joined to Microsoft Entra (Azure AD), or managed through an MDM — which is exactly how most business fleets are set up. The machines your staff use every day almost certainly don’t qualify for the free deal. For managed devices, the commercial ESU meter keeps running: Year 1 to 14 October 2026, then Year 2 and Year 3 at roughly double each time — about US$61, then US$122, then US$244 per device, or US$427 all up over three years (Microsoft prices ESU in USD; your reseller bills the AUD equivalent). That’s a per-machine tax for standing still.

With the Australian financial year just ticked over, now’s the sensible time to budget for this rather than get caught out in October. Get an inventory of which machines can actually run Windows 11 — the TPM 2.0 and CPU requirements rule out a lot of older hardware — which need replacing, and which genuinely need paid ESU as a short bridge. Treat ESU as a runway, not a destination: every year you delay costs more and leaves staff on an operating system that’s a bigger target the longer it sits outside mainstream support.

Not sure how many of your PCs are Windows 11-ready? A quick fleet audit as part of managed IT support will tell you exactly where you stand and what it’ll cost.