Microsoft has extended its Windows 10 Extended Security Updates (ESU) program by another year, pushing the new end date to October 12, 2027.
The company made almost no noise about it, slipping the change into two previously published articles and adding a brief editor’s note to a blog post. There was no press release, no announcement page, nothing at the top of the updated articles to flag that anything had changed.
The timeline so far: Windows 10 stopped receiving regular updates in October 2025. At that point, Windows 11 had only barely overtaken Windows 10 in market share, which was a problem.
Microsoft responded by offering everyone on Windows 10 a free year of security patches through October 2026. Now that window has been extended again to October 2027, with hardly a word from the company.
The low-key rollout is very deliberate. Microsoft sells Windows licenses to PC manufacturers like Dell, HP, and Lenovo, and every extra year someone spends on an old machine is a year they are not buying a new one.
Announcing loudly that Windows 10 users can sit tight for another year does not go over well with those partners, especially now that an AI-driven shortage of RAM and storage has already pushed PC prices up significantly.
There is also the scale of the problem to consider. Microsoft recently reported over a billion monthly active Windows 11 users, which sounds impressive until you account for the fact that the total Windows installed base is around 1.5 billion devices.
That leaves at least 300 to 500 million machines still running Windows 10. StatCounter currently puts Windows 10 at around 26% of all PCs globally, with Windows 11 at 72%.
Part of why so many people have stayed on Windows 10 is that Windows 11 set stricter hardware requirements, especially around CPU generation and something called a Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
READ: How to Install Windows 11 on an Unsupported Windows 10 PC
A lot of perfectly functional older machines simply cannot run Windows 11 through normal means, and their owners have no interest in buying new computers just to get a software upgrade.
Others have avoided Windows 11 because of its heavy push toward AI features and changes to the interface that have not been universally well received. Microsoft has publicly acknowledged the quality complaints and promised improvements, though most of those are still in test builds.
To get the free extended updates, personal users outside the EU need to sign into a Microsoft account and sync their Windows 10 settings to the cloud. Alternatively, they can pay $30 or redeem 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points.
One ESU license covers up to 10 personal devices. Businesses do not get the same deal and have to pay per device, with their program running through October 2028.
Given how reluctant Windows 10 users have been to leave and how quietly Microsoft just handed them another year, it would not be surprising if this same extension happens again in 2027.
