Microsoft Will Sell You Three More Years. Ask What You Are Buying.

Year two of Extended Security Updates for Windows 10 began on 14 October, and the price per device doubled. The Register reports Microsoft’s list price stepping up from $61 to $122. UK resellers quoted the first year at around £58 to £60 per device, which puts year two at roughly £116 to £120 and year three at roughly £232 to £240. Run the ladder to the end of the programme in January 2030 and you have spent somewhere near £410 to £420 per device to keep a machine patched, and you still own the machine you started with.

For a 2,000-device estate, year one alone was around £116,000. The licences are cumulative, so an organisation that waits and joins in year two pays for year one as well. There is no quiet way to defer this.

Three details UK buyers get caught by. There is a minimum order of five licences. If your organisation does not already hold a Volume Licensing Agreement, expect a one-off administrative fee to set one up. And ESU is sold as an annual subscription, so buying late in a year does not get you a pro-rata price.

The deadline nobody circled

Most people filed Windows 10 under solved. Version 22H2 and the original 2015 LTSB editions went out of support on 14 October 2025, the refresh made the news, and the industry moved on.

Two dates were left behind. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 reached end of support on 13 October 2026. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 follows on 12 January 2027 with one last security update. These are the long-life builds, and they sit in the least glamorous corners of an estate: manufacturing lines, clinical equipment, control rooms, kiosks, the machine bolted to a wall that runs one piece of software written by a company that no longer exists.

There is one genuine reprieve. Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC is supported until January 2032 and is outside the ESU programme entirely. Worth checking which of your builds is which before anyone signs a purchase order.

Windows 10 did not go away, it just went quiet

Windows 10 still accounts for just under 30% of desktop share in Statcounter’s sample. In July, asset tracking service Lansweeper found 16.9% of the devices it monitors were still on Windows 10, and that migration had slowed to a crawl.

That stall is not laziness. The organisations that could move to Windows 11 already did. What remains are the two hard cases: kit running specialist applications or attached hardware that Windows 11 breaks, and machines that are perfectly capable but excluded by processor and TPM requirements. Microsoft has said it will optimise Windows 11 for systems with 8GB of RAM, which does nothing for a device ruled out by the chip inside it.

In the UK this lands hardest on the organisations least able to absorb it. NHS trusts running clinical software and attached diagnostic hardware. Local authorities with long asset lives and flat capital budgets. Schools and multi-academy trusts. Manufacturers with machines wired into production lines. These are exactly the estates where LTSC and LTSB builds were chosen in the first place, precisely because they promised a decade of quiet.

Two different problems wearing the same badge

Those two cases look identical on a spreadsheet and should be treated completely differently.

If a device runs something irreplaceable, buy the ESU. Paying for patched time while you plan a proper migration is sound engineering, and Reconome has no argument with it.

The second case is where money quietly disappears. A four or five-year-old laptop that fails the Windows 11 hardware bar is not running anything specialist. It runs a browser, a mail client and a document editor. Buying it three more years of security patches is paying rent on a device your own security policy has already retired. At the end you have spent north of £400, and you have a nine-year-old laptop.

There is one more UK wrinkle worth knowing. Primary Technology reports that on the mainstream Windows 10 ESU programme, charities and non-profits were priced at about £0.90 per device while commercial buyers paid the full amount. If your organisation donates devices rather than paying to keep them alive, the sector that receives them is operating on a completely different cost base to yours. Check whether that concession extends to the LTSC programme before relying on it.

A device your policy rejected can still be worth something

Here is the part that never makes it into the licensing conversation.

Around 1.5 million adults in the UK do not have a laptop, tablet or smartphone at all. A machine that cannot meet an enterprise security baseline is not a dead machine. Wiped to NIST 800-88 Rev.2 and IEEE 2883-2022 standards and refurbished, it is a working computer with a 12-month warranty. The value in your old tech funds devices, connectivity and skills for people who need them.

Reconome is the exclusive technology partner of the Good Things Foundation, powering the UK’s National Device Bank. Together we have committed to deliver 85,000 devices to digitally excluded people.

Four questions before you buy the licence

1. Which of our Windows 10 devices are running something we genuinely cannot replace, and which simply failed the Windows 11 hardware check?
2. Are any of these builds IoT Enterprise LTSC, and therefore supported to 2032 without ESU?
3. What is the three-year ESU bill for the second group at our actual CSP or Volume Licensing rate, not list, and what would refurbishment and rehoming return instead, in residual value, in avoided carbon and in devices delivered?
4. If we do retire them, can our disposal partner certify erasure at device level and tell us where each machine actually went?

That last one matters more than it looks. Since 1 October, operators of permitted waste receiving sites in England and Wales have to log each load they receive in a national digital service, including a waste code and the parties involved. Scotland and Northern Ireland follow in January 2027. Whether your retired estate was recovered or destroyed is starting to leave a trail that does not depend on anybody’s marketing.

The honest version of the decision

Extended Security Updates are a reasonable product for a real problem, and for part of your estate they are the right purchase. The mistake is buying them across the board because it is easier than sorting the fleet into two piles.

One pile needs paying for. The other one needs collecting. Sorting them is an afternoon’s work and it is the difference between £400 a device and a device that still has somewhere to go.

If your organisation is weighing up extended support against a refresh, talk to us about what the retiring estate is actually worth, in money and in impact.