Microsoft to offer consumers paid extended security updates for Windows 10

• Microsoft plans to make its Extended Security Updates (ESU) service available to regular consumers.
• The paid service aims to offer security updates for Windows 10 after the end of support in 2025.
• This service will only include limited updates without new features or technical support.
• The price for the ESU service is yet to be announced.
• The announcement also hints that the company won’t be extending the support of Windows 10.

Microsoft plans to offer its Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows 10 users who want to keep using the operating system after support ends in 2025. According to the company’s latest announcement, users who wish to continue using Windows 10 after October 14, 2025, can enroll in the ESU paid service to receive critical and important security updates for an additional three years.

The Extended Security Updates is a paid service that Microsoft has always reserved for organizations that need to run older versions of the operating system beyond the official support period for many reasons, including compatibility and cost. However, the company now says that it understands that some circumstances may prevent users from upgrading to a newer version before the end of the support date.

As a result, the software giant will now allow users to purchase the paid service to continue getting updates for three more years. However, the Extended Security Updates service will not offer new features, customer-requested non-security updates, or design change requests, nor will it provide technical support.

Although the support of Windows 10 is still expected for October 14, 2025, there was still a hope that Microsoft would extend the support a little longer, especially since the operating system is still more widely used than Windows 11, and recently, the company unveiled that it was reviewing the approach to Windows 10 by bringing Copilot and adding new features.

However, at this point, Microsoft isn’t considering extending support or planning more feature updates. In fact, on April 2, 2024, the company posted a new announcement detailing the pricing for organizations and noted that pricing for regular consumers will soon be revealed on its consumer end-of-support website.  

To give you an idea, organizations wanting to keep using Windows 10 beyond October 2025 will have to pay $61 per device for the first year. The second year’s price will double to $122, and the third year will cost $244. Additionally, organizations will have to purchase a minimum of five subscriptions.

Furthermore, if you skip the first year and then want to subscribe, you will have to pay for the first year you didn’t pay.

This is not a long-term solution. It’s a temporary tactic that Microsoft will use to lure commercial and regular consumers to abandon the decade-old operating system.

If you’re still on Windows 10, the best approach to avoid costly subscriptions is to upgrade to Windows 11 before the operating system reaches the end of support since there’s no cost for the upgrade, and it will not only keep your computer supported, but the device will continue to receive security update and new features as soon as they’re available.

Update April 4, 2024: This guide has been updated to ensure accuracy and reflect new details regarding pricing for organizations and clarify that the company hasn’t announced pricing for regular cosumers.