The Windows 10 bill doubles next month

IT Strategy · 4 September 2026 · 4 minute read

Windows 10 stopped receiving security updates on 14 October 2025. Machines still running it work perfectly well. They simply stop being patched, which is a different kind of problem and a slower one.

Microsoft sells a way to keep the patches coming, called Extended Security Updates. It is worth understanding how the pricing works, because it is built to make waiting expensive.

The price doubles every year

Per device, in US dollars, as Microsoft publishes it:

• Year 1, to 13 October 2026 — $61
• Year 2, to 12 October 2027 — $122
• Year 3, to 10 October 2028 — $244

Then it stops. There is no fourth year.

You cannot skip a year

This is the part that catches people out. If you did not enrol for Year 1 and you decide next month that you need Year 2, you do not simply buy Year 2. You buy Year 1 retroactively as well, and then Year 2 on top of it.

So a machine left until November costs $183 to cover through to October 2027, not $122. Waiting does not save the money. It defers the decision and adds to the bill.

What the money actually buys

Security patches. That is the entire list. No new features, no functional fixes, and no technical support. It is a holding position, not a plan.

There is a discount worth knowing about: roughly 25% off if you deploy through a Microsoft cloud update service such as Intune or Windows Autopatch.

How we would approach it

Count the machines first. Most businesses we speak to are surprised by the number, in one direction or the other.

Then take them one at a time rather than as a block. A machine that can run Windows 11 should. A machine that cannot, but is doing something specific and difficult to replace — driving a machine tool, running a piece of practice software nobody has updated in years — is a reasonable candidate for Extended Security Updates while the underlying problem gets sorted out.

The trap is treating it as the answer for three years. The doubling price is Microsoft telling you what it thinks of that idea. At $244 a device in the final year you are within reach of replacing the machine, on hardware that will by then be eight or nine years old.

The honest summary

If the whole estate can move, move it and stop paying. If part of it genuinely cannot, buy the time deliberately and put a date on when it ends. What does not work is finding out in October that a decision was made by nobody making one.