Project Online shuts down on 30 September: no licence, no export

On 30 September Microsoft switches Project Online off. The sentence in the announcement is short and does not allow for a kind reading: after that date, Project Web App sites and related data stop being available. But what decides whether you make it in time is not in that sentence. It is in the licensing terms of the service description, published long before the announcement and on a different page: any interaction with a Project Online site requires, as a minimum, a live Plan 3 or Plan 5 subscription in the tenant. Which means the licence you were going to drop to save money during the migration is exactly the one you need in order to export.

This is not a post about project management. It is a post about what happens to your data the day the application that holds it stops existing, and about why that date is almost never yours to set. Project Online is this week's example because it has a date and it has verifiable small print. The pattern repeats with anything you pay for by the month.

What goes off and what does not

What is being retired is Project Online, the portfolio management product that lives on top of SharePoint Online and is used through Project Web App (PWA). Microsoft's wording is this: "Project Online will retire on September 30, 2026. After this date, Project Web App (PWA) sites and related data will no longer be available." And lest there be any doubt about the scope, the same communication adds: "This change applies only to Project Online. It does not affect Project desktop or the upcoming Microsoft Planner."

There is an earlier date that has already passed and that broke things for a lot of people without them connecting it to any of this: on 2 April 2026 SharePoint 2013 workflows were retired, according to the Microsoft Support notice that accompanies message centre post MC542767. Those are what drive much of the approval automation in a classic PWA, and Microsoft wrote that there would be no option to extend. If a project approval got stuck this year and nobody could tell you why, that was probably it. Sales of Project Online-only SKUs ended, according to partner migration guides, on 1 October 2025.

Our reading, and it is an opinion: the announcement has been reported as a product change when it is a service shutdown. A product change leaves you where you were with a different face on it. A service shutdown takes away the place the data lived, and with it the route you use to reach that data.

The line that decides whether you can export

The official Microsoft Project service description, in its licensing terms section, says literally: "Any interaction on a Project Online site requires at least a Project Plan 3 or Project Plan 5 subscription within the tenant." Any interaction. It does not say "edit", it does not say "create projects". It is a licensing condition, not a description of which button goes dark, and that is how it should be read: what you are permitted to do without that subscription is nothing, and exporting is doing something.

Now think about what any sensible finance department does when told a product dies in September: stop paying for it. Almost always that is the right move. Here it is the one that shuts you out. The sequence that worries us is not exotic, it is the most natural one in the world: in July somebody reviews the Microsoft 365 spend, sees some Project licences that "hardly anyone uses any more" and removes them; in September the team that was supposed to export is left with no cover to get into a site that, meanwhile, is still sitting there with everything in it.

Out of this comes a rule we apply whenever we decommission anything, and it is not specific to Microsoft: the last licence goes after the export has been verified, never before. And verifying does not mean the file exists and weighs a few kilobytes. It means opening it, on another machine, without the product in front of you. If reading what you exported requires going back into the application you are switching off, you have not exported anything: you have taken an expensive screenshot.

The second clock: 120 days

Three lines further down, in the same licensing block, is the sentence that turns a licensing mistake into permanent loss: "When your last Project Plan 3 or Project Plan 5 subscription expires, your Project Online instances will be deleted after 120 days." A hundred and twenty days after your last Plan 3 or Plan 5 expires, the instance is deleted. For trial subscriptions the window is 30 days. We have not seen it quoted in any of the migration guides we have read this week.

And right above it, for the sibling product, the rule is the opposite: Project for the web instances "will not be automatically deleted until you have no active subscriptions that depend on the Microsoft Dataverse". Two products sold under the same Plan 3, with two different deletion rules. Anyone who assumes what they know about one applies to the other is going to have a calendar problem.

Here we should be honest about what we do not know. That service description page carries a 2023 revision date and does not mention the retirement: it describes what happens when you are the one who stops paying. We cannot claim the 120 days will apply to the 30 September shutdown, nor that they will not. What we can say is that there are two clocks written in two different places, that the headline only talks about one of them, and that which one applies to you depends on your billing. Our advice does not change in either scenario: do not let it come down to that interpretation.

What is inside is not just tasks

The same service description points out something that gets forgotten day to day: "Project Online requires the use of SharePoint Online, which is provisioned as part of Project Online. Rights to the SharePoint Online functionality provided with Project Plan 3 or Project Plan 5 subscriptions are limited to storing and accessing data to support Project Online." Translated: the PWA is a SharePoint site, and the rights over that SharePoint hang off the Project subscription, not off your regular SharePoint.

That changes the size of the job. It is the mistake we see most often whenever we decommission a repository, Microsoft or otherwise: it gets planned as if it were a calendar, and what sits underneath is per-project document libraries, risk and issue lists, deliverables and project sites with their attachments. A task dump takes none of that with it. If the exit plan fits into "we export the schedule", the exit plan is the wrong size.

The destination is not a like-for-like, and its small print is not where you think

The announcement points at the new Planner, and the migration guides published by programme partners add two more usual destinations: Project Server Subscription Edition and Dynamics 365 Project Operations. The first one gets the attention. If you look up Planner's published limits, the official page lists them: 3,000 active tasks per plan, 9,000 tasks per plan, 200 buckets, 20 assignees per task. Concrete, reassuring numbers.

It is worth reading the whole callout on that same page, above the table, because it has three sentences and most summaries only reproduce one. It says the article applies to "Basic plans in the Planner app in Teams" and to "All plans in other Planner endpoints (including Planner web, Planner mobile, and Planner connectors)", and then that "It doesn't apply to To Do lists or premium plans in the Planner app in Teams." Read it twice: the same premium plan falls inside or outside those limits depending on where you open it. From Planner web, inside. From the Planner app in Teams, outside. And the page closes, in case any comfort was left: "These limitations can be raised or lowered from time-to-time without a prior notice."

There are very detailed lists going around of "what does not migrate" to Planner Premium: baselines, critical path, finish-to-finish dependencies, the enterprise resource pool, timesheets, portfolio views. We are not going to reproduce them, because we have not been able to check them against Microsoft documentation and in this trade a list with no source is worth what it costs. What we will say is this: the destination's documentation attaches conditions to its own figures depending on which client you work from, and a table whose validity changes according to whether you open the plan in a browser or in Teams is not a table you can plan a portfolio with. The comparison is yours to make, with your PWA in front of you and a real test.

This is not about Project Online

Project Online is the anecdote. The pattern is that the end-of-life date of your applications is signed by somebody else, and the day they sign it you are no longer negotiating: you are executing. We see it with more clients than we would like, and almost never with the software that comes up in board meetings: it comes up with the ticketing tool somebody bought in 2018, with one department's document manager, with the e-signature platform only admin uses.

That is why, when we review a company's application map, we ask three questions about each one. One: can you get the data out without the application, or do you have to be inside it to see anything? Two: what format does it come out in, and can anything other than the vendor read it? (CSV is boring, which is exactly why it works). And three, the one almost nobody has written down: which licence does the export button depend on?

The third one is the surprise, and it is what turns an orderly migration project into data loss. We have written about the reverse case, when the clock is set by a retention policy that deletes above what you thought you had configured: there the system decided, here the invoice does. And it is worth remembering the other half, because it is the same muscle: Microsoft 365 does not make your backups for you, not even when the checkbox exists.

What we would do this week if you had a PWA

There are only a few days left and the order matters more than the tool. This is what we would do, in this order:

• Confirm the licences are still live before touching anything else. If somebody already removed them, that is today's incident, not the migration.
• Inventory what is actually in the PWA: active and closed projects, document libraries, risk and issue lists, reports, project sites. Without that list you do not know when you are done.
• Export first, choose the destination afterwards. The reverse order is what loses data: two weeks go into comparing platforms and the export window closes on its own.
• Get it out in a neutral format, not in the destination's format. A CSV and the files as they are will survive you changing your mind in six months; a proprietary export will not.
• Open what you exported on another machine, without the product. If it does not open, you do not have it.
• Licences last. And the copy of what you exported does not live inside the same Microsoft 365 you just took it out of.

That last point is the same one we wrote a few days ago about a cloud region that is not coming back: the customers who lost nothing were not luckier, they had something outside. Here "outside" does not mean another continent. It means, at minimum, outside the service that is being switched off.

What we are not claiming

The most important item in this section comes first: the sentence the headline hangs on is a licensing condition, not a technical description of what stops working. Microsoft says any interaction requires a Plan 3 or Plan 5 in the tenant; that page does not document what exactly happens when the last licence is removed, or when. That this translates into being unable to export is our inference, and we give it as such: it is the prudent reading of a condition that leaves no room, not a screenshot of an error. We are not saying Microsoft will delete anything on 1 October: we are saying the announcement says the sites and the data will stop being available, and that the 120-day deletion clause is written somewhere else and under a different premise. We do not know whether that clause will apply to the shutdown; the page containing it carries a 2023 revision date and does not mention the retirement. The three destinations we mention do not all come from the announcement: the announcement points at the new Planner, and the other two come from partner migration guides. On the Planner limits we are not claiming your plan is excluded: we are claiming the applicability callout depends on the client you open the plan from, which is what it literally says. We have not verified against Microsoft documentation the "what does not migrate" lists for Planner Premium that are going around, which is why we do not treat them as established. We have not run a Project Online to Planner Premium migration, so we are not reporting first-hand experience of that specific route: what we bring is the method we use to get data out of a service that is being switched off, which we have done many times with very different products. Nor do we know your contract: a negotiated enterprise agreement may say things the public service description does not. And we have no stake in this: we are not a Microsoft reseller, and we do not resell any of the alternatives either.

Note on sources

All consulted on 19 September 2026. One, the announcement: Microsoft's communication on the Project Online retirement, source of the two verbatim quotes — "Project Online will retire on September 30, 2026. After this date, Project Web App (PWA) sites and related data will no longer be available" and "This change applies only to Project Online. It does not affect Project desktop or the upcoming Microsoft Planner" — also relayed by university admin communications and the sector's technical press. That announcement is also the source of the only destination Microsoft names, the new Planner. Two, the licensing terms: the Microsoft Project service description page on Microsoft Learn, section Licensing terms and considerations, source of the requirement for a Plan 3 or Plan 5 subscription in the tenant for any interaction, the deletion of instances 120 days after the last Plan 3 or Plan 5 expires, the 30 days for trial subscriptions, and the different Dataverse-linked rule for Project for the web. The SharePoint Online quote comes from the same page but a different place: the Use of SharePoint Online bullet, inside the Learn more section. That page carries a 2023 revision date. Three, the destination's limits: the Microsoft Planner limits page on Microsoft Learn, updated on 21 August 2025, with its opening callout in full — it applies to basic plans in the Planner app in Teams and to all plans in other Planner endpoints; it does not apply to To Do lists or to premium plans in the Planner app in Teams — the limits table (3,000 active tasks per plan, 9,000 tasks per plan, 200 buckets, 20 assignees per task) and the closing note about changes without prior notice. Four, the other two destinations — Project Server Subscription Edition and Dynamics 365 Project Operations — come from migration guides published by programme partners, not from the announcement, and the body says so. Five, the earlier timeline: the retirement of SharePoint 2013 workflows on 2 April 2026 is documented by Microsoft Support in the article SharePoint 2013 workflow retirement, which accompanies message centre post MC542767 and states there would be no option to extend; the end of sales of Project Online-only SKUs on 1 October 2025 we have only found in partner guides and it is flagged as such. What is our opinion, and is stated as such in the body: that this is a service shutdown and not a product change; the reading that a licensing condition with no room to move amounts in practice to not being able to export; the rule of dropping the last licence only after verifying the export; the three questions for the application map; and the list of what we would do this week.

Cover image: repository room with compact mobile shelving at the State Regional Archive in Prague, photograph by Mojmír Churavý, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 / public domain. The text and branding are ours, added on top.