Microsoft 365 · Service Retirement
Project Online retires September 30. Moving your data out is your job, not Microsoft's.
The retirement itself happens automatically and asks nothing of your administrators. Everything that has to leave the service first is work somebody has to do. Whether migration tooling exists depends on which destination you pick, the export Microsoft documents for pulling out project records runs one person at a time, and Microsoft supports no process for turning the SharePoint site collection underneath Project Web App back into an ordinary site.
- September 30, 2026: projects, schedules, timesheets and reporting feeds stop being reachable
- Microsoft offers native migration tooling for Planner, and none for Project Server
- The documented export needs a licence you may be planning to drop
- Projects and service data stop being accessible through Project Online
- Reporting feeds and the Project Online APIs go with it
- Project desktop keeps working, without its connection to the service
The sequence
Three doors already closed before this one
Project Online is the last date in a sequence, and the three before it have quietly removed the options an institution would reach for first. Read them in order and the September deadline stops looking like a single event.
No new Project Web App instances
Creating new Project Online tenants and functional new Project Web App instances ended for existing customers on this date. Microsoft adds that an ordinary SharePoint site using a PWA template or a PWA-looking URL stays an ordinary SharePoint site, so a fresh site is a place to put documents, and nothing more.
The customisation layer retired
SharePoint Add-ins, Azure Access Control Services, and SharePoint 2013 workflows all retired in Microsoft 365 on the same day. Demand management and approval routing built on those workflows stopped before Project Online did, which is why some environments already feel broken.
Both on-premises versions left support
Extended support ended on the same day for Project Server 2016 and Project Server 2019. Falling back to an on-premises Project Server now means Project Server Subscription Edition specifically, which is a different product from the version already installed in the rack.
Project Online retires
Projects, schedules, tasks, assignments, timesheets, enterprise resources, calendars, custom fields, portfolio analyses and the reporting endpoints stop being reachable. Microsoft's wording is that this data is no longer accessible through Project Online after retirement.
The extraction problem
Is there a tool that moves this for you?
The answer depends on where you are going, and Microsoft gives two different answers on the same support page. Reading only one of them is how a transition plan goes wrong.
"Native migration tools are available to simplify the movement of project data from a customer's existing Project Online environment to Planner. However, if an environment has more complex elements, such as custom code and integrations, the customer may enlist a Project partner."
Microsoft Support, Frequently asked questions about Microsoft Planner, partner sectionAsked "Is there a migration tool to move projects and settings from Project Online to Project Server?": "At this time, Microsoft does not provide a migration tool. Our recommendation is to work with a partner experienced in this type of migration and equipped with the right tools."
Microsoft Support, Frequently asked questions about Microsoft Planner, migration sectionTwo destinations, two answers. Heading to Planner, Microsoft says native tooling exists to move project data, with a partner brought in for environments carrying custom code and integrations. Heading to Project Server, Microsoft says it provides no tool and recommends an experienced partner. Ask the tooling question about your specific destination, because the answer changes.
There is a second question underneath it that gets missed, and it is the one that matters most to a regulated institution. Migrating the work is a different job from preserving the record. A migration carries forward the plans your teams will keep using. On its own it hands you nothing defensible for the timesheets, baselines and approvals attached to a conversion you finished three years ago and will never touch again.
For that second job Microsoft documents something else entirely: an export built to pull one named person's content out of Project Web App. Its prerequisites are worth reading closely, because teams reach for it expecting a migration and find a different animal.
| What people assume | What Microsoft documents | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope of a run | The whole tenant, or at least a whole site | One user. The script takes a single resource ID or a single login name |
| Repetition | Run once | Once per user, per Project Web App site. A user has a different resource ID in every PWA site |
| What comes out | Everything in the site | Only projects that user owned, was assigned a task in, owned an assignment in, or was status manager for |
| Licence needed | Administrator rights | A Project Online Premium or Professional licence, plus the Project Online Desktop Client connected to the instance |
| Reusing the output | Load it back into a project system | Saving exported .mpp files back to Project Online or Project Server is not supported |
| Project Home favourites | Included in the export | Reachable in the app only. Microsoft's documented method is a screenshot |
The licence and the deadline pull in opposite directions
The instinct at renewal is to stop paying for a service that is about to disappear. The export Microsoft documents requires a Project Online Premium or Professional licence and the desktop client that comes with it. Dropping the licences first removes the documented way to get the history out.
If a renewal lands between now and September 30, that is the sequence to check before signing anything: extract first, then let the licences go.
Find out what is still in Project Online before the licences lapse
ABT inventories every Project Web App site in your tenant, names the projects and the people who own them, and tells you in writing what has to come out before September 30.
Get the free migration assessmentFor regulated institutions
Is a project plan a record?
For most organisations Project Online holds project management. For a bank, a credit union, or a mortgage company, it often holds something an examiner will ask to see.
Think about what actually went through Project Web App at a financial institution. Core conversions. Digital banking rollouts. Merger integration plans. Vendor implementations. Remediation of audit findings, tracked task by task with dates, owners and sign-offs. Those schedules are the contemporaneous record of how the institution governed a major change, which is what they were built to be.
Retention obligations attach to the record, not to the product holding it. A schedule that documents how a core conversion was planned and approved keeps whatever retention period your policy assigns it after September 30, and the service that held it will not be there to produce it. The question worth asking this month is narrow and answerable: which of the plans in Project Online are things we would have to produce, and where will they live on October 1?
"After retirement, projects and associated Project Online service data are no longer accessible through Project Online. Export or migrate required data before September 30, 2026."
Microsoft Learn, Prepare for Project Online retirementThe SharePoint site does not simply revert
A reasonable assumption is that when the Project Online layer switches off, the SharePoint site collection underneath returns to being a normal SharePoint site and the documents carry on. Microsoft addresses that assumption head on.
"There is no supported process to uninstall Project Online from a PWA site collection or convert the collection into a fully independent standard SharePoint site."
Microsoft Learn, Prepare for Project Online retirementMicrosoft is careful to say this does not mean the SharePoint content vanishes. It means the site collection does not become an ordinary SharePoint site with Project Online cleanly removed. Documents, issues, risks and deliverables in connected project sites are SharePoint content and follow normal SharePoint permissions, retention and lifecycle rules. What stops is everything the service was doing on top: task synchronisation, permission synchronisation, project metadata updates, and the project-specific web parts and workflows.
The practical consequence for a records owner is that a site being reachable proves very little. Validate direct access to the content you intend to keep, confirm who owns it and what retention applies, and move what matters somewhere it will still make sense in three years.
A plan is only evidence while someone can still open it
A project plan that recorded how a conversion was scoped, approved and tracked is documentation of governance. Its value depends entirely on someone being able to retrieve and read it on the day it is asked for, which is a different property from having created it carefully at the time.
ABT manages Microsoft 365 tenants for credit unions, banks, and mortgage companies, which means the retention and audit questions arrive on the same desk as the migration ones. They are easier to answer together than separately.
The short list
What should we do in the days that are left?
Microsoft's own preparation guidance runs inventory, classify, preserve, remediate, validate. Compressed into the time actually remaining, it comes down to six things, in this order.
Find every Project Web App site, today
A SharePoint administrator can list them from the SharePoint Online Management Shell by filtering sites where PWA is enabled, using Get-SPOSite. Microsoft documents this as the first step of its own export procedure. Organisations routinely find more instances than they expected, because subsidiaries, regions and business units were each given their own.
Decide what counts as a record before deciding what to export
Sorting every project by whether it still matters is a much smaller job than exporting everything. Start with the plans tied to an obligation: core conversions, merger integrations, vendor implementations, and remediation of audit or examination findings. Those get preserved deliberately. The rest can be a judgement call made quickly.
Run the export while the licences are still live
The export script needs a Project Online Premium or Professional licence and the connected desktop client. Because it runs per user and per site, the people to run it for are the project owners and status managers whose names are attached to the plans you decided to keep in step two.
Treat the SharePoint content as a separate exercise
Documents, issues, risks and deliverables in connected project sites are SharePoint content with their own lifecycle. Confirm you can reach them directly, that ownership and permissions are current, and that retention is applied. Plan for the site collection staying a PWA site collection, because Microsoft supports no process for converting it into an ordinary one.
Find the reports and flows pointed at the service
Project Online endpoints stop answering, which takes down anything built on REST, CSOM, JSOM, ProjectData or the OData reporting feeds. In practice that means Power BI datasets with a saved refresh credential, Excel workbooks somebody in finance built years ago, Power Automate flows using Project Online triggers, and scheduled scripts. These fail quietly, after the fact, and usually on a reporting deadline.
Write down what you chose to let go
A short memo naming what was preserved, what was deliberately retired, and who approved that call turns an expired service into a documented decision. It takes an afternoon now and answers the question cleanly whenever it comes up later.
One document worth reading in full
Microsoft's Prepare for Project Online retirement guidance goes further than any summary of it, this page included. It carries the dated timeline, a feature impact matrix that assigns every asset a disposition, and the inventory checklists behind steps one and two above. The link is in the sources below, and an afternoon with it is the best-spent time available between now and the deadline.
How ABT helps
Free migration, when you commit to the licensing
ABT is a Tier 1 Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider. We manage Microsoft 365 tenants for more than 750 financial institutions, and we run this kind of extraction as a matter of course.
We inventory what is left in Project Online, get it out, and land it somewhere supported
- The inventory, in writing. Every Project Web App site in your tenant, the projects inside them, who owns each one, and which connected SharePoint sites hang off them.
- The records call, made with you. Which plans carry a retention obligation, and what a defensible preservation looks like for each.
- The extraction, run for you. Per user and per site, in the right order, while the licences that permit it are still in place.
- The dependency sweep. The Power BI datasets, Excel workbooks, Power Automate flows and scripts still pointed at Project Online endpoints, found before they fail.
- The destination, chosen on your requirements. Planner, Project Server Subscription Edition, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, or Project desktop, matched to how your teams actually plan. Migration is free when you commit to the licensing through ABT.
ABT also operates M365 Guardian, its managed security service for credit unions, banks, and mortgage companies. Learn about M365 Guardian
Related reading
If this deadline started a wider conversation
Getting data out of a retiring service tends to raise the questions behind it: what has to be kept, for how long, and who can produce it later.
Microsoft 365 Data Retention for Financial Institutions
How to configure retention and archiving in Microsoft Purview so the platform itself enforces your recordkeeping obligations.
Read the guide
Tenant-to-Tenant Migration for Credit Union and Bank Mergers
What it takes to consolidate two Microsoft 365 tenants cleanly, and how to keep the cutover examiner-ready while it happens.
Read the guide
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery for Financial Institutions
The licensing rule that reverses between tiers, and what an institution actually needs to be able to produce content on request.
Read the guideAnswered
The Project Online retirement, answered
Verify it yourself
Where the facts on this page come from
Every date, quotation and mechanism above was read from a Microsoft source and checked on September 20, 2026.
- Microsoft Planner Blog, Microsoft Project Online is retiring: What you need to know. The retirement announcement, published September 5, 2025 and shown as updated August 24, 2026. Source for the September 30, 2026 retirement date, the October 1, 2025 end of sale, the transition options, and the statement that the change does not affect Project desktop, Project Server, or Planner.
- Microsoft Learn, Prepare for Project Online retirement. Microsoft's detailed preparation guidance, dated August 21, 2026. Source for the retirement timeline table, the April 1, 2026 limit on new Project Web App instances, what stops working, the adjacent retirements of SharePoint Add-ins and Azure ACS and SharePoint 2013 workflows on April 2, 2026, the feature impact matrix, and the statement that no supported process converts a PWA site collection into a standard SharePoint site.
- Microsoft Support, Frequently asked questions about Microsoft Planner. Source for both migration-tooling answers: native migration tools are available for moving project data to Planner, while Microsoft states that at this time it does not provide a tool for moving projects and settings to Project Server. Also the source for the Planner premium capability and licensing detail.
- Microsoft Learn, Export user data from Project Online. Source for the export procedure, its per-user scope, the licence and desktop client prerequisites, the file types produced, and the note that saving exported .mpp files back to Project Online or Project Server is not supported.
- Microsoft Lifecycle, Project Server 2016 and Project Server 2019. Both follow the Fixed Lifecycle Policy and share an extended support end of July 14, 2026, which the Planner Blog retirement FAQ states in the same words.
- Microsoft 365 Message Center post MC1148537, Microsoft Project Online is retiring: What you need to know. The tenant notification carrying the same guidance, flagged as a major change with an action-required date of September 29, 2026. Visible to administrators in your own Microsoft 365 admin center.
There is still time
to do this properly.
Ten days is enough to inventory the Project Web App sites, decide which plans carry an obligation, and get those out cleanly. It is not enough to discover on October 1 that the schedules for last year's core conversion lived somewhere that has closed.
Tell us a little about your environment and we will come back with what we would check first.
What should we look at? Optional.
Encrypted. Private.
Thank you. That is with us.
An ABT specialist will be in touch shortly. If your deadline is this week, say so in your reply and we will move it to the front.
