Office 2021 stops getting security updates on 13 October – two months to decide

Microsoft has confirmed that Office 2021 reaches end of support on 13 October 2026. After that date there are no more security updates, no more bug fixes and no more support for it.

The applications themselves keep working. Word opens, Excel calculates, Outlook collects the post exactly as before. Nothing on screen will tell anyone that the software has stopped being maintained, which is precisely why this deadline gets missed while noisier ones get met.

Microsoft’s own guidance is to move to Microsoft 365 Apps, or, for businesses not ready to work that way, to Office LTSC 2024 – the current version you still buy once rather than rent.

Who this affects

Businesses that bought Office outright. If you paid once, some years ago, and have not paid since, that is Office 2021 or older and this is your deadline. If you pay monthly or annually per person for Microsoft 365, you are already on the version that updates itself and there is nothing here for you to do.

The risk is not evenly spread across the applications. A spreadsheet you wrote yourself is low risk. Outlook is the one to think about, because it spends all day opening files and messages sent by strangers – which is exactly the situation security patches exist for. An unpatched mail application is a different proposition from an unpatched calculator.

Worth checking too: anyone still on Office 2016 or 2019 passed this point last year and is already running without updates.

What to do before October

• Find out what you actually have. In any Office app, File → Account shows the version. Expect a mix – offices rarely have just one.
• Decide between renting and buying, on the numbers. Microsoft 365 is per person per month and includes the updates. Office LTSC 2024 is one payment and will itself expire one day. Neither is automatically right; it depends how long you keep machines.
• Count the licences you actually need. Businesses routinely pay for people who left and miss people using a copy from a machine that was replaced.
• Check what else assumes that version. Accounts packages, CRM plug-ins and mail-merge templates sometimes care which Office is installed. Better to find out in September.
• Move before the deadline, not on it. A planned migration is an afternoon. The same job in a hurry, after something has gone wrong, is a week.

A decision worth ten minutes now

This is not an emergency and we would not pretend otherwise – it is a diary entry with two months’ notice. But it is the kind that quietly becomes urgent, because nothing breaks on the day and the prompt to act never arrives.

If you would like to know what you are running and what it would cost either way, that is a quick job for us – we go through it as part of IT support, and we will give you a straight comparison rather than a push towards the subscription. Our Office 365 support covers the move itself if that is the way you go. Ask us and you will hear back in about 15 minutes on average.

Call us on 01202 237 273 or book a call.