Project Online shuts on 30 September, and its data goes with it

Project Online shuts on 30 September, and its data goes with it

21 September 2026: Microsoft's cloud project and portfolio service reaches its retirement date in nine days. The company's lifecycle page puts the moment at 08:00 Pacific time on 30 September 2026 - 16:00 in London - and its own retirement notice is blunt about what follows: after that date, customers "will no longer be able to access" their projects or any associated data within the service.

What changes, and what does not

The retirement covers Project Online only. Microsoft states that it does not affect Project desktop, Project Server Subscription Edition or Planner, and that the retirement "will happen automatically" with no administrator action required. The dates leading up to it have already passed: sales of Project Online-only plans to new customers ended on 1 October 2025, and existing customers lost the ability to create new tenants on 1 April 2026. The notice was first published in September 2025 and was last revised on 24 August this year.

The same notice records a second deadline some organisations may have missed: Project Server 2016 and Project Server 2019 reached the end of extended support on 14 July 2026.

Microsoft names three destinations. Planner with its premium features - portfolios, baselines, dependencies and Gantt charts - is included in the Planner and Project Plan 3 and Plan 5 licences, and Microsoft says Project Online customers already have access to it. Project Server Subscription Edition is the on-premises option for organisations that need the closest match to Project Online's portfolio features. Dynamics 365 Project Operations is aimed at teams that depend on timesheets and resource scheduling.

What to do this week

Treat 30 September as the last day the data exists, not the day to start moving it. Microsoft's own advice is to back up data "if needed" before the retirement date; for most organisations it is needed.

Start with an inventory: every project, its owner, and whether it is still live. Export the schedules first, then the things that are hardest to rebuild - baselines, custom fields, resource assignments and the timesheet history, which is often what finance or a client audit asks for later.

Then look outward. Anything that reads from the service stops with it: reports, dashboards, integrations and scheduled exports built on Project Online will fail on the first run after the cutoff, so find them before they fail rather than after.

Finally, check the licence position. The destination Microsoft recommends is one many customers already have access to; the on-premises server is the option that brings hardware, patching and support back in house. If the plan is to buy something else entirely, the export is still the first job, because a new vendor can only import what you took out in time.

Sources

• Microsoft Planner Blog, "Microsoft Project Online is retiring: What you need to know" (updated 24 August 2026) - 5 September 2025
• Microsoft Lifecycle, Project Online support dates (read 21 September 2026) - 21 September 2026