Roughly a billion PCs still run Windows 10. Microsoft just bought them another year.

Microsoft just gave Windows 10 a quiet reprieve. The company edited its consumer support page to push the cutoff for Extended Security Updates (ESU) from October 2026 to October 12, 2027, a second bonus year for machines meant to go dark this fall. No blog post, no keynote, no press release. The new date just appeared.

That matters more than a footnote edit suggests, because Windows 10 did not exactly empty out when support officially ended. Estimates still put roughly a billion PCs on the operating system, and a large share of them physically cannot move to Windows 11 because of its hardware floor. When the deadline moved, it moved for one of the biggest installed bases in computing. So it’s worth walking through exactly what got extended, who qualifies, and why Microsoft keeps sliding this date to the right.

What ESU actually is

Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025. After that date, Microsoft stopped shipping the three things a healthy OS depends on: technical support, feature updates, and quality updates that include “security and reliability fixes,” in the company’s own words. ESU is the lifeline it sells around that cliff.

The program’s narrow on purpose. It “enables PCs to continue to receive critical and important security updates through an annual subscription service after support ends,” and nothing else. Microsoft’s documentation is blunt about the limits. No new features. No customer-requested non-security fixes. No design changes. No general support beyond getting ESU itself activated and installed. You are buying patches for the worst holes, not a maintained product.

There is also a hard prerequisite. A machine has to be on Windows 10 version 22H2 to take the updates at all. If you stayed on an older build, you are not eligible until you update to 22H2 first.

It helps to be clear about what “critical and important” means here, because those are not loose adjectives. They map to Microsoft’s security severity ratings, the same scale that governs Patch Tuesday for supported versions. A flaw rated Critical is one an attacker can exploit with little or no user interaction, often remotely. ESU covers those. It does not cover the moderate and low-rated bugs, the performance regressions, or the driver quirks that a fully supported OS would still get fixed. You are paying to keep the front door locked, not to keep the whole house maintained.

The consumer deal got better

Here is the part most people care about. For individuals, Microsoft offers three ways onto the ESU track, and two of them cost nothing.

• Turn on Windows Backup to sync your PC settings to a Microsoft account. That alone enrolls you, free.
• Redeem 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, the loyalty currency you earn from Bing searches and the Microsoft Store.
• Pay a one-time $30 (or local equivalent), which covers up to 10 devices tied to your account.

Every path requires signing in with a Microsoft account that has administrator rights, and child accounts are blocked. The catch buried in two of the three options is the account itself. The free route asks you to sync settings to OneDrive, which nudges holdouts deeper into Microsoft’s cloud at the exact moment they were trying to keep an old, local-only machine alive. That’s the trade for a free year.

The June change is the second twist. The original consumer offer ran through October 13, 2026, a single bonus year with no renewal. Microsoft has now quietly extended consumer coverage to October 12, 2027. According to Windows Latest, which first flagged the edit, “If you’re already enrolled, your coverage will automatically continue through that date, no action needed.” Enroll once, get the rollover for free.

Why businesses pay real money

The consumer prices look generous next to what companies face. Commercial and education ESU is sold through Microsoft’s Volume Licensing program at $61 per device for year one. Then it gets punishing: “The price doubles every consecutive year, for a maximum of three years.” Year two is $122, year three is $244, and the charges are cumulative, so a company that waits until year two has to pay for year one too.

A school or business can stretch this to three years total, ending in 2028, while consumers cap out a year earlier. The doubling is the whole strategy. Microsoft is not trying to make ESU comfortable for organizations. It’s a meter that gets more expensive the longer you ignore it, designed to make a Windows 11 migration or a Windows 365 cloud subscription look cheap by comparison. Virtual machines on Azure and Windows 365 get ESU at no extra cost, which tells you where Microsoft would rather you land.

Why the goalposts keep moving

Microsoft’s official line is that it wants everyone on Windows 11. So why keep handing out reprieves?

Because the numbers force its hand. Windows 11 now sits near 73% of the desktop Windows base, but that still leaves Windows 10 around a quarter of all Windows PCs, hundreds of millions of machines. A chunk of those cannot upgrade no matter how willing the owner is, because Windows 11 demands a TPM 2.0 security chip and a recent CPU that older hardware simply lacks. Microsoft has kept iterating on Windows itself in the meantime, even rebuilding core command-line tools in Rust, but none of that reaches a machine stuck below the hardware bar. Pulling security patches from that many internet-connected machines on a fixed date is a security and public-relations problem Microsoft would rather defer than own.

The e-waste critique sharpens the point. Consumer and repair advocates have spent the past year arguing that a hard cutoff effectively orders people to junk working computers to satisfy a software requirement, not a real performance need. A laptop from 2018 runs fine. It just lacks the TPM chip Windows 11 insists on. Telling its owner to recycle it and buy new hardware, purely to keep getting patches, is the kind of forced churn that draws regulators and right-to-repair campaigners. Each extension is Microsoft buying itself distance from that fight.

The flip side is honest too. Every bonus year also slows the migration Microsoft genuinely wants, and it trains users to assume the next deadline will move as well. That expectation is now baked in. The same dynamic plays out in the enterprise, where firms have learned that loudly resisting a vendor’s timeline sometimes works, as the Broadcom and VMware standoff has shown. Microsoft is threading a needle: it wants the deadline to feel real enough to drive upgrades, but soft enough that it never has to be the company that knowingly left a billion machines exposed.

What this means for you

If you run a Windows 10 PC at home, the smart move is to enroll in ESU now even if you plan to upgrade, because enrollment is what locks in the free 2027 rollover. The cheapest route is turning on Windows Backup sync, though weigh the OneDrive and Microsoft-account strings before you do. If your machine meets the Windows 11 bar, treat this as breathing room to migrate on your own schedule, not a reason to stop. And if your hardware can’t make the jump, ESU through October 2027 is the most secure way to keep that machine online while you decide whether to replace it or move to Linux. One thing not to bank on: a third free consumer year. Microsoft has moved this date twice, but the doubling commercial price and the official push toward Windows 11 both point the other way.