Access 2016 and Access 2019 lost Microsoft support in October 2025. Access 2021 loses it on 13 October 2026. If your job numbers, your goods-in records or your inspection history live in an .accdb file on a shared drive, this is the point at which someone has to make a decision about it rather than carry on.
The honest version first: nothing stops working on the day. What changes is the risk you are carrying and who is left to help you when it goes wrong.
Access does not have its own lifecycle. It follows the Office suite it came in, so the date that matters is the one attached to your Office version.
| Version | Support ends | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| Office / Access 2013 | 11 April 2023 | Unsupported for over three years |
| Office / Access 2016 and 2019 | 14 October 2025 | Already unsupported |
| Office / Access 2021 and Office LTSC 2021 | 13 October 2026 | The one most firms are on |
| Office / Access 2024 and Office LTSC 2024 | 9 October 2029 | Supported |
| Microsoft 365 Apps | No fixed date | Supported while kept current |
Dates published by Microsoft. See Microsoft's lifecycle announcement for Office LTSC 2021 and its end of support page for Office 2021. Checked on 29 August 2026. Microsoft can and does move dates, so check the current position before you plan around it.
There is a lot of loose talk about Access dying. It is worth separating what has been announced from what has been guessed at.
Microsoft has not withdrawn Access. It is still in Microsoft 365 and still in Office LTSC 2024. What is happening is ordinary lifecycle: each version gets a fixed number of years and 2021 has reached the end of its allocation.
Your database will still open. Microsoft's own wording is careful about this. The applications keep working. Files keep opening. Nobody at Microsoft flips a switch on the thirteenth.
What stops is the backing. No security updates for anything discovered from that date onwards. No bug fixes. No phone or chat support. And on Office 2021 specifically, Microsoft has said there is no extension and no paid extended security updates programme, so unlike Windows 10 there is no way to buy yourself another year.
So the question is not whether the thing breaks on a particular Tuesday. It is whether you are content for a system the workshop depends on to sit permanently outside the supported estate, with every vulnerability found after that date staying open.
Not in a dramatic failure. It bites when your insurer's cyber questionnaire asks whether all business software is supported and patched, when a customer's supplier audit asks the same, or when your IT provider quietly puts unsupported Office on the list of things they will not troubleshoot.
Those three arrive on their own schedule, not Microsoft's, which is why the date on the calendar matters less than having an answer ready when one of them lands.
An unsupported word processor is an inconvenience. An unsupported database holding your traceability is a different kind of problem, for four reasons.
A Word document that goes wrong can be retyped. Eight years of job records, certificate numbers and material batch references cannot. The value in an .accdb file is almost never the software. It is the history inside it and that history is often the thing an auditor asks to see.
These databases are typically built by one capable person who has since retired or moved on. The VBA is often password-locked and the password left with them. When it stops working, there is no support line to ring and no colleague to ask and that was already true before the support date.
Access has no server. Every PC opens the actual file across the network and writes straight into it. A dropped connection or a laptop lid closing part-way through a write leaves the file inconsistent, which is where "the database needs to be repaired" comes from. Support ending does not cause that. It removes the last person who might have helped with it.
If you hold ISO 9001, or you supply into aerospace, automotive, rail or medical, your records are subject to review by people who did not write them. "It is on an unsupported system that one person understood" is a difficult sentence to say in an audit and a harder one to say twice.
This takes about a minute per machine and it is worth doing properly, because offices very often turn out to be running two or three different versions without knowing it.
Any database will do. You are not looking at the data, only at the program.
On some versions it is called Office Account. The product name is on the right-hand side.
It will say Microsoft 365, or Access 2021, 2019, 2016 or 2013. That is the line that matters. Write it down.
PCs bought in different years usually have different Office versions on them and it is often the odd one out that causes the trouble.
How many people open the database in a normal week and where the file physically lives. Those two answers, plus the version, are enough for anybody to tell you how urgent your situation genuinely is.
I build replacements for a living, so take the last card with that in mind. The first three are still sometimes the right answer and I would rather say so here than after you have paid me.
Costs nothing. Right more often than people admit. If two people use it, the file sits on one PC rather than a share, the data is backed up somewhere you trust and nobody external audits your records, then the honest answer is that the deadline is not really about you.
What makes this the wrong choice is when the database is genuinely load-bearing and there is no plan for the day it will not open.
Buys supported software to October 2029. Moving to Office 2024 or Microsoft 365 puts you back inside support and answers the audit question. If the support date is your only problem, this is the cheapest way to fix it and you should do it.
What it does not do is change how Access behaves. Shared-drive corruption, locking and one file that six people fight over all work the same in 2024 as they did in 2016.
Right when your process is ordinary. If what you do is standard job management or standard stock control, there is proven software for it and buying it is sensible. You get a product with a roadmap and a support desk behind it.
The catch is per-user, per-month pricing that never stops and the fact that most firms who built their own database did so precisely because their process was not standard.
Right when the database matches how you actually work. Same fields, same job numbers, same rules, running in a browser instead of a file. No Office dependency at all, so no future support date applies to it. Genuinely multi-user and usable from a tablet in the workshop or a phone on a customer's site.
From £1,950 depending on the size of the job. It costs real money and takes real time, which is why the blueprint comes first and free.
The longer version of how a rebuild works, including the four failure modes behind most broken Access databases, is on the Access replacement page. There is also a working example you can use with made-up data and nothing to sign up for.
No. Microsoft has not announced that Access is being withdrawn. Access is still included in Microsoft 365 and in Office LTSC 2024. What is ending is support for particular versions. Access 2016 and Access 2019 lost support on 14 October 2025. Access 2021 loses it on 13 October 2026.
Read the difference carefully, because a lot of what is written about this online blurs the two. A version losing support is normal and scheduled. A product being withdrawn is not and has not happened.
No. Microsoft is explicit that the applications keep running. What stops is security updates, bug fixes and technical support. The file opens on 14 October exactly as it did on 12 October.
The change is in the risk you are carrying, not in the software. Anybody telling you otherwise is selling something in a way I would not.
No. Microsoft's own guidance on the end of support for Office 2021 states that there is no extension and no extended security updates. That is different from Windows 10, where a paid extended updates programme was offered and it catches people out because they assume the two work the same way.
Open Access, go to File, then Account and read the line under the product name. It will say Microsoft 365, or Access 2021, 2019 or 2016.
Check more than one machine. If different PCs in the office were bought at different times they are very often not on the same version and that mismatch causes its own problems quite separately from the support date.
The support deadline does not apply to you while your subscription is current on a supported version of Windows. The other problems with a shared Access file still do.
Microsoft 365 updates more often, not less. That is what produces broken references and forms that worked on Friday and do not on Monday, on some machines and not others.
It buys you supported software until 9 October 2029, which is a real gain if the only issue is the support date. If somebody has asked you an audit or insurance question about unsupported software, this answers it.
It does not change how Access works. A file opened over a network share by several people at once behaves the same way in Access 2024 as it did in Access 2016, because that is a property of the design rather than a fault in a particular version.
Builds start from £1,950 depending on the size of the job, with no VAT to add and no per-user fees. Before you commit anything you get a written blueprint, free, saying what it would become, what it would cost and how long it would take.
The blueprint sometimes says the job is not worth doing. I would rather tell you that than sell you a replacement you did not need.
From two weeks once the quote is accepted. Your existing file stays exactly where it is throughout, because I work from a copy.
Most firms run both side by side for a week or two, then quietly stop opening the old one. There is no cut-over weekend and no day when everything has to move at once.
Probably not and I would say so on a call. The honest risk on a single-user, single-machine database is much lower than the marketing around this deadline suggests.
The one thing worth doing regardless is making sure a copy of the file exists somewhere other than that PC and that somebody other than its user knows where it is.
Attach a copy of the .accdb, or a few screenshots if it is too big or too sensitive to email and tell me in a line or two what it is meant to do and which Office version you are on. Within two working days you get a written breakdown: what it would become, how long it would take and exactly what it would cost.
Free whether or not you hire me. No sales call unless you ask for one.