August 19, 2026
Windows 10 ESU Updates: What NJ Businesses Must Do
August 19, 2026
Microsoft pushed out another security update for Windows 10 in August 2026. If you're still running Windows 10 machines in your office, yes, that update matters. But here's the thing a lot of business owners don't realize: those updates are no longer free.
Windows 10 officially hit end of support in October 2025. After that date, staying patched requires paying for Microsoft's Extended Security Updates program, known as ESU. Year one costs around $61 per device. Year two doubles that. By year three you're looking at $244 per device, and the program only runs through October 2028 at the latest.
So if you've got 20 workstations still on Windows 10, you're spending real money just to keep them in a supportable state, not to keep them modern.
The August 2026 ESU patch does useful things. It delivers security fixes and continues work on expanding Secure Boot certificates, which helps protect machines from certain firmware-level attacks. That's genuinely important, especially for businesses that handle client data or work in regulated industries like healthcare or finance.
What ESU does not cover: new features, performance improvements, or compatibility with newer software. You're paying to keep a machine secure, not to make it better. And as application vendors start dropping Windows 10 support, you'll eventually run into software that simply won't install or won't run correctly.
I've already seen this with a few clients running older accounting software that vendors quietly stopped testing on Windows 10 after the EOL date. It works until it doesn't, and troubleshooting that kind of compatibility problem eats up time nobody has.
This is where a lot of small businesses fall through the cracks. If you're not actively managing Windows updates through something like Intune or Windows Update for Business, you may not actually be enrolled in ESU at all. Your machines might just be sitting there, unpatched, and nobody knows it.
A quick way to check: look at Windows Update on the machine and see if it's showing updates or throwing errors. If it stopped updating after October 2025 and nobody noticed, that's a problem. An IT admin can also check the Windows Update logs or use a tool like Microsoft Intune to get a compliance report across all devices at once.
If you're a Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscriber, ESU for Windows 10 was included free for year one through a Microsoft program. That benefit is worth confirming with whoever manages your licensing, because it's easy to miss.
For most of my clients in the 10 to 75 employee range, the calculus is pretty straightforward. If a machine is under four years old and otherwise healthy, upgrading it to Windows 11 is usually free and takes an afternoon. If it's older than five years and can't run Windows 11 because it fails the TPM 2.0 or processor requirements, then you're probably looking at a hardware replacement conversation anyway.
Paying ESU fees on a six-year-old machine that also needs a RAM upgrade and a new SSD doesn't make financial sense. That money goes toward a new device that's faster, more secure, and supported through 2031 or beyond.
The businesses I'd tell to seriously consider ESU are those with specialized hardware or software that's genuinely tied to Windows 10 and can't be moved yet. Think industrial control systems, medical devices with embedded software, or legacy line-of-business applications with no upgrade path. In those cases, ESU buys you time to plan a proper migration.
Pull a list of every Windows 10 machine in your environment. Check the hardware specs against Microsoft's Windows 11 compatibility tool. Separate the machines that can upgrade from the ones that can't. For the ones that can, schedule the upgrades now before the ESU costs stack up further. For the ones that can't, document why and set a realistic replacement date.
If that inventory doesn't exist or nobody's sure what's running what, that's actually the first problem to solve. You can't make good decisions about patching or upgrades without knowing what you're working with.
Exine helps NJ businesses get visibility into their device inventory and build a realistic Windows 11 migration plan, so these decisions don't get made by accident.
