Microsoft Access end of life: what is actually ending, and what to do

If you have searched for "Microsoft Access end of life", you have probably found a mix of panic and reassurance and come away no clearer. So, plainly:

Microsoft has not discontinued Access. It is still part of Microsoft 365, and there is a current on premises release, Access LTSC 2024. Anyone telling you the product is dead is selling something.

The version you are running may well be out of support, or about to be. That is a different problem, and it is real.

The dates that matter

Support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 ended on 14 October 2025. That includes Access 2016 and Access 2019. No security updates, no bug fixes, no support.

Support for Office 2021, including Access 2021, ends on 13 October 2026. That is less than three months away at the time of writing. Microsoft publishes the detail on its own lifecycle pages.

Both of those are perpetual licence versions, the sort you bought once and installed. If you subscribe to Microsoft 365, Access keeps updating and none of this applies to you directly.

What "out of support" does and does not mean

It does not mean the software stops. Your database will open on 14 October and on every day after it. Nothing detonates.

What it means is that no more security patches are issued. An Access database is a file, usually sitting on a shared drive, usually full of the business's operational data, opened daily by several people, often containing VBA code that runs automatically. An unpatched application handling that combination is exactly the sort of thing an insurer or a Cyber Essentials assessor asks about, and exactly the sort of thing your customers' procurement questionnaires are starting to ask about too.

So the deadline is not the emergency. It is a prompt to look at a risk that has usually been sitting there for years.

The risks that were already there

In most of the Access systems we are asked to look at, the version number is the least of it.

The original developer has gone. This is the common case. Somebody built it, possibly a contractor, possibly a member of staff who has since retired, and nobody currently in the business can safely change it. Every request becomes a negotiation with a black box.

It is a file on a share. Multi-user Access works by several people opening the same file over the network. It is fragile, it corrupts, and the standard fix is compact and repair plus a restore from last night's backup, which means losing today's work. Microsoft documents a maximum of 255 concurrent users, but in practice a shared file misbehaves a long way below that.

There is a 2GB ceiling. That is the hard limit on an Access database file. Businesses that have been running for a decade tend to meet it eventually, and the usual response is archiving data out, which is how history gets lost.

It only works at a desk, on the network. No usable access from a phone, from a customer site, or from home without dragging it through a remote desktop session. For a business with engineers, drivers or carers in the field, that alone is now the biggest cost.

The logic lives in VBA. It works, but the pool of people who will pick it up shrinks every year, and none of it is tested in any modern sense.

Your four options

1. Do nothing, deliberately

Legitimate if the database is small, used by two people on one site, holds nothing sensitive, and is not how you make money. Write down that you have made the decision, keep the file backed up somewhere that is not the same server, and revisit it annually. Doing nothing by choice is fine. Doing nothing by drift is not.

2. Get onto a supported version

Move to Microsoft 365 or Access LTSC 2024. This is the cheapest response and it closes the patching gap, which is worth doing regardless. Be clear about what it does not do: the file on the share, the 2GB ceiling, the desk bound access and the departed developer are all still there. This buys time, it does not solve anything.

3. Keep the front end, move the data

The halfway house. Move the tables into a proper database such as SQL Server, and keep Access as the interface on top. You get real concurrency, real backups, far less corruption, and room past 2GB, without rewriting the screens your staff already know.

It is a sensible step when the Access application itself is decent and the pain is genuinely about reliability and size. It is not worth much when the application is the problem, because you still cannot use it from a phone and you still have nobody who can change it.

4. Rebuild it as a proper application

The right answer when the database is central to how the business runs. What you gain is what Access cannot give you at any version number: use from any device, several people working at once without fear, permissions, an audit history, proper integrations with the accounts package, and a supplier who can change it when the business changes.

The part that surprises people is that the Access database is an asset in this project rather than a burden. Twenty years of real business rules are encoded in it, along with the data. A rebuild that starts by reading what is already there is a much better specification than a blank page, and the migration path is usually clear.

This is the work we describe on our legacy system replacement page, and the price bands are published on the bespoke software development page: most projects fall between £15k and £60k, with a single process replacement at the lower end. Migrating an Access database is one of the cases where the data itself drives the cost, which our guide to what bespoke software costs goes into.

How to choose between them

Three questions, in this order.

1. If this database were unavailable for a week, what would it cost? If the honest answer is "we would cope", option one or two is probably enough. If the answer is that the business stops, treat it as a system, not a file.
2. Can anyone in the business safely change it today? If not, you are already running an unsupported system, whatever Microsoft's dates say.
3. Do people need it away from their desk? If yes, no amount of upgrading Access will get you there.

A reasonable plan for the next few months

Find out which version you are actually running, and who else uses the file. Take a backup that lives somewhere other than the server, and confirm you can restore it. If you are on 2016, 2019 or 2021, get onto a supported release, because it is cheap and it removes the compliance question. Then, separately and without the deadline pressure, decide whether the thing is worth rebuilding.

If it would help to have somebody look at it with you, the free process audit covers exactly this. Sixty minutes, usually on site, and you will get a straight answer, including "leave it alone" where that is the right call.