Over the summer Microsoft quietly gave Windows 10 another year of free security updates. The consumer program that was supposed to end this month now runs until October 12, 2027. If you saw that headline and relaxed about the two or three older PCs still sitting in your office, I would like to change your mind.

The fine print matters

Microsoft’s own page is plain about it: the consumer program “can’t be used in commercial scenarios.” It is not offered on devices joined to an Active Directory domain or Microsoft Entra, or enrolled in a device management system like Intune. Those are exactly the things a properly managed business computer usually is.

So the free extension mostly helps the PC at home. Your office PC is in a different program entirely.

What businesses actually have

For organizations, Extended Security Updates are a paid subscription, per device. Microsoft priced year one at $61 and doubles it each year after that, for a maximum of three years. The years are cumulative, so a business enrolling a PC now, in year two, pays for both: $183 per device to keep getting patches through next October. Year three brings the running total to $427.

The real question is not the money

$183 might be perfectly reasonable for one machine. What I would look at is what you are buying. Security patches only. No new features, no fixes for anything that isn’t a security problem, and every year fewer software vendors willing to support their products on an operating system Microsoft has already retired. A Windows 10 PC gets more expensive to protect and less useful to own the longer it stays.

The machine I worry about more is the one that isn’t enrolled in anything. Not because someone weighed the risk and accepted it, but because nobody made a decision at all. That PC got its last regular security update a year ago this month, and it is still on your network, still opening email.

Sometimes there is a good reason a machine is still on Windows 10. It runs one piece of software nothing else will, or replacing it is a budget conversation nobody wanted to have yet. Those are real reasons. They are also exactly the kind of decision that should be made on purpose, with a date attached.

So here is my question: if there is a Windows 10 computer still in use at your office, do you know which program it is in, if any, and what the plan is for it?