A plain-English breakdown of the shutdown, the dates that matter, and what to do before your data disappears.
If your organisation still runs Project Online (PWA), you’ve probably seen the retirement notice. What’s less clear is what actually breaks, and when.
The dates that matter
- 1 October 2025 – Sales stopped. No new Project Online licences.
- 1-2 April 2026 – New PWA sites blocked. SharePoint 2013 workflows behind Project Online’s stage-gates and approvals stopped working.
- 30 September 2026 – Hard shutdown. PWA, the OData reporting endpoint, timesheets, and the enterprise resource pool all switch off the same day.
- ~90 days after – A short read-only data window, then it’s gone.
What actually stops working
On retirement day, four things go dark at once:
- PWA itself – the interface disappears.
- The OData endpoint – every Power BI report, every export, every integration pulling from it breaks.
- Timesheets – approval workflows, time tracking, cost roll-ups: gone.
- The enterprise resource pool – cross-project capacity visibility disappears with it.
Your SharePoint sites tied to individual projects will still technically exist (they’re SharePoint content, not Project Online content) – but the portfolio layer that made sense of them is gone.
Why Microsoft is doing this
Not a cost-cutting move. Microsoft has been explicit that Project Online’s legacy architecture can’t support the AI-powered, cloud-native direction they’re taking with Planner, Copilot, and the Planner Agent. The investment is going into the new stack, not the old one.
What replaces it, and what doesn’t
Microsoft’s recommended path is Planner Premium (formerly Project for the Web, now merged into the unified Planner experience). It’s a genuinely strong scheduling and task tool. It is not, on its own, a portfolio, resource, or governance replacement — and that gap is the subject of our next article.
What to do now
If you haven’t already:
- Export your data — don’t wait for the retirement date; aim for well before it.
- Inventory what actually lives in Project Online beyond schedules: custom fields, workflows, resource pools, reports, approval processes.
- Pilot the migration on one programme before committing your whole portfolio.
- Plan for a 12–16 week migration window for a mid-sized PMO — custom fields and reports take longer to rebuild than the projects themselves.
Next in this series: what organisations who’ve already migrated to Planner Premium are discovering — and how to avoid it.
Sources: retirement dates, official replacement guidance, and Microsoft’s stated rationale are per Microsoft’s official Project Online retirement announcement (Microsoft 365 message centre notice MC812729) and the Microsoft Community Hub post “Microsoft Project Online is retiring: What you need to know.”
Download: 30 Sep 2026 Project Online Retirement
