It doubles. Every year.
Commercial ESU was US$61 per device for year one, which started in November 2025. Microsoft has said the price doubles every consecutive year, for a maximum of three years. Year two pricing lands from November 2026.
Cloud & infrastructure
Free tool · Time sensitive
Still on Windows 10? Here's the bill.
Support ended on 14/10/2025. If you're paying for Extended Security Updates to buy time, the price doubles every year — and it is cumulative, so putting the decision off costs you the years you skipped as well.
Extended Security Updates
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Replacing the fleet instead
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Indicative only, and deliberately simplified. ESU is priced per device in US dollars through Volume Licensing and does not include any technical support. Real numbers depend on your licensing agreement, how many machines can take Windows 11 as they are, and whether some of them should move to Cloud PC instead. Happy to work through it properly with you.
What Microsoft has actually said
Four things people get wrong about ESU.
It's cumulative.
If you decide to buy in during year two, you pay for year one as well. Waiting doesn't save you the first year's cost. It just delays it and adds to it.
There's no support attached.
ESU buys you security updates and nothing else. If a machine breaks, Microsoft's answer is that the operating system is out of support. You're paying to stay still, not to be looked after.
It's free in a few places.
Windows 10 running as a virtual machine in Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure VMs or Azure Local gets ESU at no cost, as do Windows 10 endpoints connecting to a Windows 365 Cloud PC with an active subscription. For some businesses that changes the maths entirely.
The one nobody's talking about
Windows 10 wasn't the only thing that went out of support that day.
14 October 2025 also ended support for a long list of things that are still quietly running in offices on both sides of the Tasman:
- Exchange Server 2016 and 2019. An unsupported mail server with a public face on it is the one we'd deal with first.
- Office 2016 and 2019. Including Visio and Project.
- Skype for Business Server 2015 and 2019.
Plenty of builders and manufacturers are still running an on-premise Exchange because it has never given them a reason to think about it. That's exactly the problem — it won't give you a reason until it gives you a very expensive one.
Want the real number rather than the rough one?
We'll audit what you've actually got — which machines can take Windows 11 as they are, which need replacing, and which would be cheaper as a Cloud PC. It's part of the free IT review, and you get the numbers in writing.