What happens on 14 October
Nothing breaks. The machines boot on Wednesday the same as they did on Tuesday. What changes is the patching: ESU year one covered 15 October 2025 to 13 October 2026, and year two runs 14 October 2026 to 12 October 2027. A Windows 10 machine without a year two licence simply stops receiving security updates from that date.
The published list prices per device, per year, tell you everything about Microsoft's intent here. Year one was around €48.50, year two is around €97, and year three, covering 13 October 2027 to 10 October 2028, is around €194. In Australian dollars, after your reseller's margin, think of it as roughly doubling from somewhere near a hundred dollars a machine. Past October 2028 Microsoft has announced nothing at all.
Skipping a year costs more, not less
ESU licences are cumulative, which catches people out. If you sat out year one and want cover now, you buy year one and year two. There are no partial years and no pro rata. Waiting doesn't reduce the bill, it just moves the same charge later and adds whatever you missed on top.
The minimum purchase is a single licence, so there's no volume floor stopping a four-person practice from covering one stubborn machine. In the Cloud Solution Provider channel it arrives as a multiple activation key, which is worth knowing because it means someone has to actually apply it.
The free option isn't for you
There's a consumer ESU programme that runs to 12 October 2027, and it's either free if you sync your PC settings, 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or a one-off thirty US dollars covering up to ten devices. Every few weeks someone sends us that page asking why we're quoting hundreds of dollars a machine.
The answer is in the eligibility rules. Consumer ESU excludes any device joined to an Active Directory domain, any device joined to Microsoft Entra, anything enrolled in an MDM, and kiosk devices. That's most business computers in Australia, and certainly any machine in a practice with a proper tenant behind it. If the office PCs sign in with work accounts, the consumer price doesn't exist for them.
Enrolling takes longer than you'd think
A machine has to be on Windows 10 version 22H2, fully up to date, with the ESU licensing preparation package installed, before a licence will activate. On a well-managed fleet that's a quiet afternoon. On the PC in the back office that someone has been clicking "remind me later" on since March, it's a patch cycle, possibly two, and a few reboots in between.
So if the plan is to deal with this the day before the deadline, that's tighter than it looks.
ESU is a bridge, not a plan
Here's the arithmetic worth doing. Twelve Windows 10 machines at year two pricing lands somewhere around $1,500 to $2,000 for twelve months of security patches and nothing else. No new features, no performance, no warranty, no resale value. The same money buys two or three replacement PCs outright that are supported until 2031 or beyond.
For most practices the honest answer is to stop buying ESU for machines that could simply be replaced, and keep it for the handful that genuinely can't move yet. In clinics and design studios that short list is usually the same every time: the PC wired to an imaging sensor whose driver was never written for Windows 11, a CAD workstation tied to a licence dongle, a machine running a practice management version the vendor hasn't certified.
That last one deserves pressure. Ask your software vendor for their Windows 11 position in writing, with a date. "Not supported yet" has a habit of meaning nobody has tested it, and you shouldn't be paying Microsoft a doubling annual fee to cover a gap your supplier could close.
What to do this week
Count the Windows 10 machines. Most practices we walk into are wrong about this number, usually low, because of a reception PC or a spare laptop nobody counted.
Find out whether anyone actually enrolled them in year one. If a licence key was bought but never applied, you've already paid for cover you didn't get, and that's worth discovering now rather than in a quarter.
Check which machines can take Windows 11 at all. The TPM 2.0 and processor requirements rule out a lot of otherwise fine 2017 and 2018 hardware, and knowing which side of that line each machine sits on turns a vague worry into a short shopping list.
Then decide per machine: upgrade, replace, or buy year two. Whatever stays on Windows 10 should be fenced off while it's there. No mailbox on it, no general web browsing, network access limited to the one thing it exists to do. An unpatched machine that can only reach a single server is a manageable risk. An unpatched machine with Outlook and a browser on it is the start of an incident report.