Two different “supported until 2027” stories
In June 2026 Microsoft extended the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for Windows 10 without a formal announcement. Home devices can receive critical and important fixes through 12 October 2027, and enrollment stays open until that date. The commercial program did not change.
For organizations, ESU remains a paid annual subscription bought through volume licensing. Microsoft lists it at 61 USD per device for year one and states that the price doubles every consecutive year, for a maximum of three years after Windows 10 reached end of support on 14 October 2025. Year one started with the November 2025 updates, so the last fixes it covers arrive with the October 2026 patch release.
The rules that catch late buyers
ESU is sold in whole years — there are no partial periods. Licenses are also cumulative: an organization that decides to enter in year two has to pay for year one as well. Postponing the decision is not a saving, it is a deferred payment for months in which the devices received nothing.
Technical support is not part of ESU. Microsoft covers license activation, installation and possible regressions of the ESU updates themselves, and nothing beyond that.
What it means operationally
Activation is not a one-time job. Each program year has its own activation ID, which has to be applied on every device with slmgr together with a new multiple activation key from the Microsoft 365 admin center. For hundreds of workstations with no route to Microsoft activation servers, that means proxy activation through VAMT.
The prerequisites are Windows 10 version 22H2 with KB5066791 or a later update installed, followed by the ESU licensing preparation package KB5072653. A device missing either step will not receive ESU updates, whatever was purchased for it.
LTSC sits outside the program
Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC releases have their own lifecycles and the Windows 10 ESU program does not cover them. LTSC 2021 is supported until 12 January 2027 — on production lines, in healthcare and on kiosks that is a different timeline from the one that applies to ordinary office desktops.
Different does not mean distant. Microsoft opened a separate ESU program for LTSC 2021, available to purchase since 1 September 2026: 61 USD per device for year one, or 45 USD per user for up to five devices where updates are managed through Intune or Windows Autopatch — note the unit, the second price is per user rather than per machine. The price again doubles every consecutive year and the program runs for at most three years, to 8 January 2030. An estate with LTSC machines in it has two separate purchases to plan, on two separate deadlines.
Virtual machines at no extra cost
ESU is included for Windows 10 virtual machines in Azure, Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365 and Azure Local. If part of the estate runs as VDI, the number of paid licenses can be well below the raw device count in the register.
What to settle before October
- Get an exact count of physical machines on Windows 10 22H2, separated from LTSC and virtual ones.
- Check which of them meet the Windows 11 requirements — for those, migration costs less than a second ESU year.
- Decide on year two for the remainder and get it into the procurement cycle before October.
- Prepare the procedure for swapping the activation ID and the MAK in the fall.
The quality of that decision rests on the inventory behind it. If GLPI records the operating system version and edition, the license count takes half a day to derive. If the numbers come out of spreadsheets, organizations usually pay for machines that have been sitting in storage for weeks. Unpatched workstations are also a problem for the security measures under Slovak decree 227/2025 — essential service operators entered in the register by 31 December 2024 have to have them in place by 31 December 2026, a few weeks after the ESU decision has to be made. Operators registered later get twelve months from their entry in the register.