Windows 10 has officially expired.
It was a good run — more than 10 years in all, starting July 29, 2015, and ending on Oct. 14, 2025. Over the course of the last decade, it became an unqualified success among consumers and business customers alike. And it’s continued to be insanely popular more than four years after the release of its successor, Windows 11.
Also: How to upgrade your ‘incompatible’ Windows 10 PC to Windows 11 – 2 free options
That’s good news, right? Well, not exactly.
If this were a normal transition from one Windows version to the next, Microsoft would simply need to convince its enormous installed base to leave their beloved Windows 10 behind and upgrade to Windows 11 for free. But the company complicated things by releasing Windows 11 with a set of strict hardware requirements that make it impossible for the owners of many Windows 10 PCs to upgrade via normal channels.
The result is a big mess, with hundreds of millions of otherwise perfectly functional PCs denied access to monthly security updates, with no supported upgrade path.
Also: Can’t upgrade your Windows 10 PC? Support has ended, so you need to act now
I wrote the original version of this post in July 2023, when that end date was more than two years in the future, and I’ve been revisiting the topic regularly to help answer some burning questions. This revision was published on the day support officially ended.
Every version of Windows in the modern era adheres to a 10-year support lifecycle. That means nearly every Windows 10 edition — Home, Pro, Pro Workstation, Enterprise, and Education — reached its end-of-support date on Oct. 14, 2025. (For the nerdy details on how that date is calculated, see “When will Microsoft end support for your version of Windows or Office?”)
So, what happens now that the official end-of-support deadline has passed? Nothing. Seriously, absolutely nothing happened on that date. PCs running Windows 10 continue to work just as they always have, and they will do so indefinitely.
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However, those PCs no longer receive security fixes through Windows Update unless their owners sign up for an Extended Security Updates (ESU) subscription. On Windows 10 PCs without an ESU subscription, any newly discovered security flaws will remain unpatched, making those PCs increasingly vulnerable to online attacks.
The only exception to this cutoff date applies to PCs running Windows 10 Enterprise Long Term Servicing editions, which have end-of-support dates that range from October 2026 to January 2029. But those editions are exclusively for enterprise customers with volume license agreements and aren’t relevant to mainstream PCs.
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No one outside of Redmond knows how many PCs are still running Windows 10 today. Microsoft can probably make a solid estimate based on its telemetry, but the rest of us are forced to guess based on fragmentary third-party metrics.
The most widely quoted measurement is from the monthly “market share” reports published by Statcounter Global Stats. Unfortunately, those metrics have always been unreliable and inconsistent, but beginning in May 2025 they became completely unbelievable. (If you believe the Statcounter numbers from September 2025, hundreds of millions of PCs downgraded to Windows 7 over the summer. LOL, that did not happen.)
This is what the Statcounter numbers looked like back in April 2025.
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As of six months ago, nearly half of all Windows PCs were still running Windows 10, according to Statcounter data.
Statcounter/ZDNET
One of the alternative sources I have relied on over the years is the US government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP), which has a well-organized repository of information about traffic to official websites run by agencies like the Postal Service, the National Institutes of Health, the National Weather Service, the IRS, and NASA. But its data has also been affected by the same analytics glitches that affected those Statcounter reports.
A few reliable recent data points are available. Developers of the TeamViewer remote access platform analyzed a sample of 250 million TeamViewer sessions that occurred between June and September 2025 and found that 41% of devices connected via Windows 10. And a mid-2025 analysis of over 1 million enterprise endpoints from ControlUp reported that roughly half of all enterprise devices were still running Windows 10.
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My best guess, based on available data, is that roughly one-third of all Windows PCs worldwide are still running Windows 10. That adds up to somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 million PCs that are now officially out of support.
Many of those PCs will qualify for extended security updates, but for the vast majority, that stopgap will end in one year, in October 2026.
Even if the pace of upgrades unexpectedly accelerates as old PCs are retired and replaced with shiny new Windows 11 models, hundreds of millions of consumer and small business PCs will be running Windows 10 in one year when the security updates stop for good. Yikes.
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There’s a large population of people that can’t or won’t upgrade.
- Those who don’t qualify for an automatic upgrade. Some people own older hardware that doesn’t meet the minimum hardware compatibility standards for Windows 11. Basically, that means any PC that was designed in 2018 or earlier. Note that this category includes many budget PCs that used older designs and unsupported CPUs but were sold as new in 2019 and 2020.
- Corporate PCs that are standardized on Windows 10. A nontrivial number of enterprise IT managers aren’t ready to go through a wholesale Windows 11 migration. Many of them will use the normal upgrade cycle to perform that migration over time, and they have the option to pay for Windows 10 upgrades for up to three years after the end-of-support date.
- Windows 10 diehards. From my time spent reading support forums, I know there’s a large population of longtime Windows users who are unhappy about the changes in Windows 11. Some of them will reluctantly upgrade, but others won’t.
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Microsoft and its OEM partners would prefer that the owners of those devices dump them in a landfill and buy a new PC running Windows 11. However, my experience with PC owners, especially older people on a fixed income, is that they will use those devices until they stop working. Those PCs will be sitting ducks for a cyberattack like WannaCry, which was brutally effective against the large population of Windows 7 PCs that were still in use three years after its support ended.
That incident was a PR nightmare for Microsoft, and a repeat would be even more devastating to the company’s reputation. Enterprise customers will likely take advantage of paid options to extend support for Windows 10 by three years. But consumers are already on their own and will be completely abandoned in a year.
Brad LaPorte, a former Gartner analyst who now works for enterprise security firm Morphisec, says the end-of-support deadline is a “security cliff.” He adds, “Every month after October 2025, unpatched devices will become softer targets for ransomware and zero-day exploits. The harsh reality is that attackers have already moved into position.”
Luis Corrons, a security evangelist at security firm Avast, notes that “unpatched Windows and driver bugs become long-lived entry points.” And even if those vulnerabilities aren’t exploited directly, he adds, the end-of-support deadline is an opportunity for scammers. “People may see fake pop-ups, upgrade offers or even get phone calls pretending to be from Microsoft.”
We’re in uncharted territory.
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