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Migration & Strategy

Microsoft Project Retirement Timeline 2026: Every Deprecation Affecting Your PMO

April 2 retired SharePoint 2013 workflows, July 14 ends Project Server 2019 support, September 30 retires Project Online. Three Microsoft retirements in six months that affect every PMO running on the legacy stack.

Onplana TeamMay 18, 202610 min read

If you opened the Microsoft 365 admin center any time in the last twelve months, you have seen the banner: Microsoft Project Online retires on September 30, 2026. That is the date everyone is racing toward.

What gets discussed less is that Project Online's retirement is not a single event. It is the third and largest of three retirements happening inside a six-month window, each of which breaks a different layer of the SharePoint-based PPM stack that PMOs have run on for the last decade.

This page is the consolidated timeline. Three events, exact dates, what each one breaks, and the canonical Onplana post for each event with the migration detail.

The three dates, in order:

Date Event Status as of May 18, 2026
April 2, 2026 SharePoint 2013 workflows retired 46 days past
July 14, 2026 Project Server 2019 end of mainstream support 57 days away
September 30, 2026 Microsoft Project Online retires 135 days away
The Microsoft Project retirement window, six months 1 April 2, 2026 SharePoint 2013 workflows retired (past) 2 July 14, 2026 Project Server 2019 end of mainstream support (57 days away) 3 September 30, 2026 Project Online retires (135 days away) migration window already burned 135 days remain to cutover

April 2, 2026: SharePoint 2013 workflows retired

The first event has already happened. On April 2, 2026, Microsoft turned off SharePoint 2013 workflows across all Microsoft 365 tenants. Any Project Online site using those workflows for governance, project request approval, stage gate routing, status submission, change request approval, lost those workflows that day.

If you are not sure whether your tenant was affected: open the Project Online PWA admin site, navigate to Workflow Settings, and look at the workflow platform column. Anything marked "SharePoint 2013 Workflow" is now non-functional. The workflow definitions are still visible in admin, but they no longer execute.

What broke specifically:

  • Enterprise Project Type (EPT) stage gates: any EPT bound to a 2013 workflow now skips stage routing entirely. New project requests go straight to "Planning" without approval.
  • Status submission flows: PM-to-portfolio-manager status routing that ran on a 2013 workflow no longer fires.
  • Custom approval routing: any custom workflow built on the 2013 platform.

What to do now: if you have not already, audit the workflows and decide whether to rebuild them on Power Automate (the supported successor) or skip the rebuild and let governance run manually for the remaining 135 days until Project Online itself retires. Many PMOs are choosing the latter: a Power Automate rebuild that you are going to retire in five months is rarely worth the effort.

Full detail: SharePoint 2013 Workflows Retire April 2, 2026: What Breaks for Project Online Governance.

July 14, 2026: Project Server 2019 end of mainstream support

The second event hits in early July. Project Server 2019, the on-premises sibling of Project Online, reaches end of mainstream support on July 14, 2026. Microsoft Support stops accepting new feature requests and stops issuing non-security updates. Security patches continue through the extended support window (multiple years out), but mainstream support is the bar that matters for most organizations on a vendor risk register.

This event affects fewer PMOs than the Project Online retirement, because most on-premises Project deployments have already migrated to cloud, but the ones still on Project Server 2019 face a particular problem: their natural upgrade target is Project Online, which retires 77 days later. Two cliffs in roughly two and a half months.

The successor inside Microsoft's stack is Project Server Subscription Edition, which has a different licensing model and is not a backwards-compatible upgrade. Migration to Subscription Edition is non-trivial, and after the Subscription Edition migration you still face the question of whether Subscription Edition is the long-term destination or whether you skip it and move to a cloud product instead.

What to do now: if you are on Project Server 2019, treat this as a forcing function to plan the destination decision now, not in July. The math does not work to migrate to Project Server Subscription Edition in time for July 14, then migrate again before September 30.

Full detail: Project Online vs Project Server End of Life: What PMOs Need to Know.

September 30, 2026: Microsoft Project Online retires

The big one. On September 30, 2026, Microsoft Project Online stops working. After that date:

  • Project Web Access (PWA) stops loading. The UI goes dark.
  • The OData REST API stops responding. Any reporting, BI, or integration that reads from https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa/_api/ProjectData/ stops returning data.
  • Timesheet workflows stop firing. Any open timesheets at that moment are stuck.
  • Project Online tenants retain a short read-only window for data export, but the live service stops.

This is the retirement that affects the most PMOs by a wide margin. If you are running Project Online today and you do not have a migration in flight by mid-May 2026, you are in a tight spot.

The work itself, in rough order:

  1. Discovery: inventory active projects, custom fields, baselines, resource pool, EPTs, reports. Decide which subset to migrate and which to archive.
  2. Destination selection: Microsoft Planner Premium, a third-party tool (Onplana, Smartsheet, Monday, Asana, Jira, Wrike), or roll your own. Decisions take 4 to 6 weeks alone.
  3. Pilot: migrate one or two real projects to the destination, validate fidelity, get PM sign-off.
  4. Full migration: usually batched across waves to avoid moving 100 projects in one shot.
  5. Parallel operation: 2 to 4 weeks where projects live in both systems while the team validates.
  6. Cutover: freeze writes on Project Online, redirect logins, decommission.

A serious migration runs 8 to 12 weeks of focused effort, depending on the volume of active projects and the complexity of the customizations. As of mid-May 2026 you have ~135 days. The buffer is gone.

The canonical migration playbook: How to Migrate from Microsoft Project Online: A Complete 2026 Playbook.

Other essential reading per migration stage:

The destination story: Planner Premium and Project Plan 5

Microsoft is steering Project Online customers toward Microsoft Planner Premium, accessed via Project Plan 1, Plan 3 (formerly Project Online Professional), or Plan 5 (formerly Project Online Premium) licenses. Planner Premium merges the original Planner (Kanban task boards), Project for the Web (lightweight cloud scheduling), and Microsoft To Do into a single product surface.

For lightweight task management, Planner Premium is a credible product. For Project Online's actual feature set, it falls short:

  • No portfolio management at Project Online's depth (no EPTs with stage gates, no resource pool, no proper portfolio rollups).
  • No baselines beyond Baseline 1 (Project Online supports Baseline 0 through 10).
  • No OData reporting feed (a significant break for BI and custom reporting).
  • No custom enterprise fields in the Project Online sense (lookup tables, formula fields, calculated dependencies).
  • No timephased resource leveling.
  • Only one dependency type (Planner supports FS only; Project Online supports FS, SS, FF, and SF).

The honest read: Planner Premium is a credible destination for PMOs whose Project Online usage was already lightweight. For PMOs running portfolios, enterprise governance, or sophisticated scheduling, Planner is a downgrade. The gap is not closing fast enough for September 30 to be a viable replacement.

Full detail: Microsoft Planner Premium Falls Short for Enterprise PMOs · Microsoft Project Online vs the New Microsoft Planner · Migrate Microsoft Planner to Onplana.

What the three retirements have in common

Three different products, three different dates, but one shared pattern. The SharePoint-based PPM stack that Project Online was built on is being unwound layer by layer. The order:

  1. Workflow layer (April 2): the governance and automation glue.
  2. On-premises sibling (July 14): the self-hosted product that some PMOs used as a stopgap.
  3. Cloud product (September 30): the headline retirement.

A one-sentence read of Microsoft's direction: the SharePoint-PPM cloud era is over, and Microsoft is consolidating its cloud PM offering around Planner / Project for the Web with Power Platform as the automation layer. Project Server Subscription Edition continues for on-premises customers, but it is a different product and a different decision.

This matters operationally because the deprecation cadence is going to continue. Tenants running on the SharePoint-PPM stack today should expect their workflow integrations, custom solutions, and reporting infrastructure to be deprecated piece by piece over the next 18 months. The "we'll deal with it later" path does not work because there are more deprecations behind these three.

What Onplana ships for each event

Onplana is purpose-built as a modern Microsoft Project alternative for PMOs leaving the SharePoint-PPM stack. For each of the three events:

For the SharePoint 2013 workflow retirement: Onplana provides native stage-gate and governance approval primitives, so the EPT routing that broke in April can be rebuilt on Onplana's own workflow engine rather than on Power Automate.

For Project Server 2019 end of support: Onplana imports .mpp files directly (MSPDI XML or native binary), preserving all four dependency types, baselines, custom fields, and the critical path. The compatibility audit at Microsoft Project Migration Compatibility Audit 2026 covers exactly what survives the import and what needs manual rebuild.

For Project Online retirement: Onplana reads directly from the Project Online OData feed (/_api/ProjectData/) in addition to .mpp binary import. That makes the migration faster: pull active projects via OData in one batch instead of asking PMs to export each project as .mpp by hand. The Migration Cost Calculator produces a three-year line-item budget in about three minutes; the Schedule Health Check runs seven structural integrity checks against your .mpp files in 30 seconds.

For the head-to-head against Microsoft's own destinations: Onplana vs Microsoft Planner and Onplana vs Microsoft Project Online Comparison 2026.

What to do this week

If you are a PMO director reading this in mid-May 2026 and your migration has not started:

  1. Pick the destination tool this week. Six weeks of evaluation is six weeks of migration runway gone.
  2. Run one project through the destination as a pilot before you commit. Real fidelity testing on your specific files matters more than the vendor's demo. Start with the free schedule health check and migration preview.
  3. Start the data export now. Project Online's OData feed performs best in May and June; the closer you get to September, the more tenants are running concurrent exports against the same backend.
  4. Decide what NOT to migrate. Most PMOs have 30 to 50% of their Project Online content that does not need to move. Closing old projects and archiving historical baselines reduces the migration scope considerably.

The honest read at mid-May 2026: the SharePoint-PPM cloud era ended on April 2 and the last cloud product will be gone by September 30. The PMOs that come out of this transition cleanly are the ones who treat all three dates as one program, not three separate events.

Microsoft is moving on. The question is whether your PMO does it on Microsoft's timeline or on its own.

Microsoft Project retirement timeline 2026Project Online end of lifeProject Server 2019 end of supportSharePoint 2013 workflows retirementMicrosoft Planner PremiumProject Plan 5PMO migration 2026Microsoft PPM deprecationenterprise project management 2026

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