Microsoft is switching off Project Online on 30 September 2026

A product that ran a lot of the world's project plans for over a decade has about six weeks left. The interesting part is not the shutdown. It's what the shutdown reveals about where your work actually lives.

Microsoft has confirmed that Project Online retires on 30 September 2026. After that date, Project Web App sites and the data inside them stop being available. Sales to new customers ended on 1 October 2025, so the wind-down has been running for a while, but the hard stop is now close enough to count in weeks.

Microsoft's own explanation, published on its Planner blog, is that Project Online's legacy architecture limits the delivery of modern AI-powered and deeply integrated experiences across Microsoft 365. Translated out of press release, that means the old thing is hard to bolt Copilot onto and they would like everyone on the new thing. Which is a perfectly reasonable position for a software company to hold. It is a slightly less comfortable position for a project manager holding eight years of schedule history.

What is actually being retired

Worth getting this right, because the naming is a mess. This affects Project Online, the cloud service built on SharePoint that includes Project Web App. It does not affect Project desktop, Project Server, or Planner. Microsoft is pointing existing customers toward Planner with premium capabilities, Project Server Subscription Edition, or Dynamics 365 Project Operations, depending on what they were using Project Online for.

If you are reading this as an individual or a three-person team, none of that is your migration path and you probably were never on Project Online in the first place. Stay with me anyway. The failure mode here is not specific to Microsoft, and it is absolutely specific to how most of us store our work.

The export deadline is not the retirement date

Several consultancies tracking the timeline are telling clients to have data fully extracted and verified well before 30 September, with early September suggested as the practical cutoff. Their reasoning is straightforward: there is no contractual guarantee of a read-only grace period after the retirement date, so planning around one is planning around a rumour. Sources disagree on whether any informal window will exist. As of August 2026, the safe assumption is that it won't.

The same consultancies report other dates further up the timeline that bite earlier, including a block on creating new Project Web App sites from April 2026 and the retirement of the SharePoint 2013 workflows that a lot of Project Online governance quietly depended on. If your organisation is affected, verify those against Microsoft's own documentation rather than against a blog post, this one included.

Every hosted tool has a 30 September

Here is the part that generalises. Project Online is a Microsoft product, sold by Microsoft, hosted by Microsoft, and it is still going away on a date Microsoft picked. If a vendor that size can sunset a decade-old service, the odds that your favourite six-person startup's task app will outlive your career are not encouraging. This is not a knock on small vendors. It's arithmetic.

The question that matters is not "will this tool survive". Nobody knows. The question is "if it disappears on ninety days' notice, what do I lose". For most people the honest answer is: the structure. You can usually get a CSV of task names out of anything. What you rarely get out is the shape of the work, who owned what, what was waiting on whom, why a thing stalled in March. That context is the actual asset, and it is the first thing to evaporate in a migration.

We have written before about the hidden cost of overcomplicated project software, and this is the version of that cost nobody puts in the business case. The more elaborate the system you built inside a tool, the more of it is unportable.

The boring test

There is a simple thing you can do this afternoon with whatever tool you currently use. Export everything. Open the file. Read it.

Not "confirm the export button exists". Actually open the download and see whether a human being could reconstruct your work from it. If the export is a JSON file with your projects, your cards, your columns, and your history in readable form, you are fine, and you can stop worrying about your vendor's roadmap. If the export is a proprietary archive that only reimports into the same product, you don't have a backup. You have a hostage receipt.

This is why Axtio's JSON export is a one-click, plain-file affair rather than a support ticket, and why the free tier keeps your board in your own browser by default. We would like you to keep using Axtio. We would like it more if that were a choice you kept making rather than one you were stuck with.

What we'd actually do

If you're affected by this specific retirement, the advice is dull and correct: export now, verify the export by opening it, and treat the migration as a chance to drop the parts of your setup nobody used. Most Project Online instances accumulated custom fields the way a garage accumulates paint tins.

If you're not affected, take the free lesson. Pick your most important tool and run the boring test on it. Then read the shutdown clause in the terms, which will tell you how much notice you are owed, and which is usually shorter than you'd guess.

The broader movement toward keeping the primary copy of your data on your own device is having a genuinely good year, and we covered its annual gathering in our write-up of Local-First Conf 2026. Retirement announcements like this one are the best marketing that movement has ever had, and nobody had to pay for it.

Sources

Microsoft, "Microsoft Project Online is retiring: What you need to know", Microsoft Community Hub. Migration timeline and export guidance as reported by Onplana and The Project Group. Accurate as of August 2026.