Windows 10 End of Support: What ESU Really Costs You

Windows 10 security updates run until 12 October 2027 through the consumer ESU programme, and how you sign up depends on where you live. In the European Economic Area Microsoft offers two enrolment routes. In the United States it lists three. That difference is the reason most guides you find online do not match the screen in front of you.

Support for Windows 10 ended on 14 October 2025. Ten months on, the deadline panic is over and a quieter question has taken its place. Your machine still works, it still boots in twenty seconds, and you would rather not replace it because a chip on the motherboard is the wrong version. So what are the actual options, and what does each one cost you?

What ESU gives you, and what it withholds

ESU stands for Extended Security Updates. Microsoft’s own page on the programme, checked on 8 August 2026, is specific about the boundaries: critical and important security updates only.

No new features. No non-security fixes. No design change requests. And no technical support, apart from help activating the ESU licence itself and installing the ESU updates. If your printer driver breaks in March 2027, that is your problem to solve.

What ESU is not is a lifeline for the machine. Your PC keeps working without it. Nothing switches off on the day support ends, no files disappear, no screen goes blue. The exposure builds quietly instead, which is exactly why it is easy to keep postponing. Microsoft adds that antivirus software on its own does not close the gap, because an operating system that stops receiving patches stays open to anything discovered after the last one.

Why the answer changes depending on where you live

Read an American guide and you will be told there are three ways in: sync your PC settings and pay nothing, redeem 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or make a one-time purchase of $30. That is accurate for the United States. It is not what you get in Europe.

The European pages carry their own heading for consumers in the European Economic Area, and under it sit two routes rather than three. Staying signed in with a Microsoft account, or paying once to keep a local account. Settings sync and Rewards points do not appear as enrolment options at all.

Microsoft confirms the split in its own FAQ, noting that enrolment options and timing may vary by region, “such as in the European Economic Area (EEA)”, while the updates themselves are applied consistently everywhere. Both pages were checked on 8 August 2026. If you have been hunting for a Rewards option that your Settings screen refuses to show, that is why. It was never there.

Can I get Windows 10 ESU without a Microsoft account?

Not entirely, and this catches people out. Enrolment always requires a Microsoft account, including on the paid route, and the licence is tied to whichever account you used. What paying buys you is the right to stop there: once enrolled, you can go back to your local account and stay on it.

Take the free route and the account is not a one-off formality. It becomes a standing condition, and that is the part worth understanding before you choose.

The sixty-day rule almost nobody mentions

If you enrol at no cost by staying signed in, and then stop signing in to Windows with that Microsoft account, updates for the device are discontinued after a period of up to 60 days. Microsoft states this plainly on the programme page. Once they have stopped, resuming them means enrolling again.

For a laptop you open every morning, this costs you nothing and you will never notice it. For the machine in the spare room that gets switched on when someone needs to scan a document, sixty days is roughly the natural interval between uses. That is the device where $30 stops looking like money wasted on something available for free, and starts looking like insurance against a lapse you would only discover afterwards.

Route	Cost	What it asks of you	Covered until
Free upgrade to Windows 11	Nothing, if the hardware qualifies	An afternoon, and the risk that an old peripheral has no driver	Ongoing
ESU while staying signed in with a Microsoft account	Nothing	Your local account, plus a sign-in inside every 60-day window	12 October 2027
ESU bought to keep a local account	One-time $30 USD or local currency equivalent, plus tax	A Microsoft account for the purchase only	12 October 2027
Clean install of Windows 11 with your own licence	The price of the licence	A reinstall and restoring your files	Ongoing

One clause in the fine print can flip the arithmetic completely: an existing ESU licence covers up to 10 devices. A household with three ageing machines, none of which meets the Windows 11 bar, enrols once rather than three times. Per machine, the paid route suddenly costs very little.

There are conditions on the device itself, too. It has to be running Windows 10 version 22H2 with the latest update installed, you need to be signing in with an administrator account, and the Microsoft account cannot be a child account. Enrolment lives in Settings, then Update & Security, then Windows Update, where a link appears if the machine qualifies.

When enrolling is the wrong move

Plenty of Windows 10 machines need none of this, and pretending otherwise would be selling you something.

A PC that never touches a network is the clearest case. If it drives a cutting machine, a lab instrument or a plotter from 2011 and has no cable and no wireless card, the threat model that ESU addresses does not apply to it. The same goes for a laptop used offline for writing.

If you already know you are replacing the machine before the end of the year, enrolling is effort spent on something you are about to throw away. And at the other end of the scale, if this is the computer you bank on, read mail on and file your taxes with, treat ESU as a stopgap rather than a decision. Get onto Windows 11 if the hardware allows it.

Some machines are excluded outright. The consumer programme is not meant for commercial scenarios, so devices in kiosk mode are out, as are devices joined to an Active Directory domain or managed through an MDM solution. If your PC belongs to your employer, this is a question for whoever manages it.

What if the PC is also used for work?

This is where the rules get more precise than most summaries admit, and the distinction is not about who owns the laptop but about how it is managed. A device registered with Microsoft Entra can still use the consumer programme. A device joined to Entra, or joined to an Active Directory domain, or enrolled in mobile device management, cannot.

There is a consequence that catches freelancers in particular. If a machine enrols in the consumer programme and later moves into one of those managed scenarios, the consumer enrolment is suspended on that device for as long as it is being used commercially. It is not revoked, and it comes back when the device leaves that situation, but in the meantime the updates stop arriving.

So if you are self-employed and your one computer does both jobs, keep it out of any domain or management platform you were thinking of joining for a single client project. The cost of that decision is no longer just administrative.

If you upgrade instead: the hardware bar

Moving from Windows 10 Home or Pro to the equivalent Windows 11 edition is free when the machine meets the minimum requirements. Those requirements are the whole reason the ESU programme has an audience, and in practice one line does most of the rejecting.

Component	Windows 11 minimum
Processor	1 GHz or faster, 2 or more cores, 64-bit
Memory	4 GB RAM
Storage	64 GB or larger
Firmware	UEFI, Secure Boot capable
Security chip	TPM version 2.0
Graphics	DirectX 12 compatible or later, WDDM 2.0 driver
Display	Larger than 9 inches diagonally, HD resolution (720p)

Before you accept a verdict of “this PC does not meet the requirements”, check the firmware. On a great many machines from 2016 onwards, TPM 2.0 is built into the processor but switched off by default. Intel calls the setting PTT, AMD calls it fTPM. Turning it on takes two minutes in the UEFI menu and moves a fair number of computers from the unsupported column to the supported one. Do that before you spend anything at all.

How much does a Windows 11 licence cost?

If the free upgrade path is closed to you, or you want a clean install rather than an upgrade over the top of an old system, you need a licence of your own. The card below pulls the current price straight from the shop, so it stays accurate however long this article sits online.

Choosing between Home and Pro matters less at home than the naming implies. Pro adds BitLocker, Hyper-V and the ability to join a domain. If none of those three describe how you work, Home is enough, and we have set the two side by side in buying Windows 11 Pro for less, including what separates a legitimate offer from one that will stop activating.

What I would do with a PC that still runs well

Start in the UEFI, because it is free and it takes minutes. If TPM was disabled and you enable it, there is a real chance the upgrade offer appears and this entire question ends with a progress bar and a cup of tea.

If that fails, enrol in ESU now rather than in six months. The end date does not move to reward patience, so every month of delay is a month of exposure you have paid for with nothing. Daily driver and no objection to a Microsoft account? Take the free route. Occasional machine, or a deliberate preference for a local account? Pay the once and stop thinking about it.

Then put October 2027 in your calendar, not as a purchase date but as a reminder that the same choice returns without the option to defer again. A computer that cannot run Windows 11 today will not be able to run it next year either. ESU buys time, and time is the only thing it buys.

One last thing worth folding into the same decision. If your Office licence is aging alongside the operating system, settle both at once rather than reinstalling twice; we compare the subscription and the one-off purchase in Office 365 versus Office 2021. And if you are wondering whether a resold licence is above board in the first place, the European ruling that settles it is explained in is second-hand software legal.