Windows 10 Support Has Ended: What It Means for Your Office in 2026

Windows 10 Support Has Ended: What It Means for Your Office in 2026

Short version: if any computer in your office still runs Windows 10, you have a decision to make before Year One of Microsoft's paid update programme closes in October 2026. Miss it and keeping those machines patched gets three times more expensive.

What actually happened

Microsoft ended standard support for Windows 10 on 14 October 2025. Machines still running it do not stop working, but they stop receiving security updates unless they are enrolled in the Extended Security Updates programme, which is a paid subscription.

Most home users have already moved on. Small offices have not. As of May 2026, the most recent month Statcounter has published, 22.79% of desktop Windows machines in the United States were still running Windows 10, against 74.85% on Windows 11. That remaining share is concentrated in businesses without a dedicated IT person. If that describes your office, you are not behind the curve so much as in the part of the curve that nobody helped.

Why October 2026 is the deadline that matters

Extended Security Updates are sold in one-year blocks, and the pricing is deliberately structured to discourage sitting still. Year One costs $61 per machine and runs to October 2026. Here is the part most people miss:

You cannot skip a year. If you enrol after Year One closes, you are charged for Year One retroactively as well as Year Two. A machine enrolled in Year Two costs $183, not $122. By Year Three the cumulative cost is $427 per machine.

For a ten-person office that is the difference between roughly $610 this year and $1,830 if you wait, for computers that will still be three years older than they are today.

The part nobody mentions: some machines cannot upgrade at all

Windows 11 requires a security chip called TPM 2.0 and a processor from roughly 2018 or later. A large number of perfectly functional business PCs fail that test. For those machines there is no upgrade path. The only options are to keep paying for extended updates, replace the machine, or run it unpatched.

This matters beyond security. If a computer cannot run Windows 11, it usually cannot run BitLocker drive encryption either. If your profession requires you to attest that client data is encrypted at rest, an unencryptable machine is a compliance problem, not just an old computer.

Prices are moving against you

Computer memory has become dramatically more expensive through 2026. In February, Gartner forecast that surging memory costs would push PC prices up 17% compared with 2025 levels, on the back of a projected 130% rise in combined memory and solid state drive prices. Memory alone is expected to account for 23% of what it costs to build a PC by the end of 2026, up from 16% in 2025.

The practical effect is that quotes now expire quickly. The pricing we are given typically holds for about two weeks rather than the month it used to, and figures can move between the day you approve a purchase order and the day stock ships. This is unusual, and it is worth knowing before you start collecting quotes.

What we would suggest

  1. Find out what you actually have. Most offices do not have a current list of their computers, their ages and their specifications. You cannot make a sensible decision without one, and if you work in a regulated profession you are probably required to keep one anyway.
  2. Split the fleet into three groups: machines that can upgrade to Windows 11 for free, machines that cannot and must be replaced, and machines you would replace anyway because they are slow.
  3. Replace in waves, not all at once, unless you have a reason to do otherwise. Twenty to thirty percent of your machines per year keeps the cost predictable and stops every computer in the office ageing out simultaneously.
  4. Get quotes early and expect them to be short-lived. Ask any supplier how long their pricing holds. If they cannot tell you, that is informative.

We can do the first step for you, free

Pine Tech Group is a Maryland business working with offices across Frederick County and the surrounding area. We will come to your office, spend about thirty minutes going through your computers, and give you a one-page inventory: what you have, how old it is, which machines can take Windows 11 and which cannot.

There is no charge and no obligation to buy anything. You keep the document either way, and if you work in a profession that requires a written security plan, that inventory is a document you need regardless of who you eventually buy from.

Request an office IT review

Where these numbers come from

We would rather you checked us than took our word for it. Every figure above comes from one of these three places, and all of them are public.

If something here goes out of date and we have not caught it, tell us and we will correct it.

Windows and BitLocker are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Last reviewed 1 August 2026.