Project Online Licensing: What to Cancel and When

Project Online retires September 30, 2026. That date is in every migration plan, every retirement FAQ, and every M365 admin calendar. The date that isn't in most of those plans is October 1, 2026: the day your Project Online licensing rolls over for another billing cycle on a service you can no longer use.

Microsoft's subscription model doesn't auto-cancel licenses when a service retires. Your Project Plan 3 and Project Plan 5 subscriptions keep billing until someone in the M365 admin center explicitly cancels them. For organizations on annual subscriptions, the exposure is higher: if you miss the cancellation window before your renewal date and the subscription auto-renews for 2026–2027, you're paying for a full year of a retired service.

The cancellation process itself is straightforward. The planning and timing decisions around it are where most PMOs leave money on the table.

What Project Online Licensing Actually Includes

Before walking through the cancellation steps, it helps to know which licenses are in scope. Project Online licensing is not a single SKU: it's a set of related licenses that may have been provisioned independently, often by different administrators at different times.

The two main tiers are Project Plan 3 and Project Plan 5. Project Plan 3 (the successor name to Project Online Professional) gives users full Project Web App access and includes the Project Desktop client. Project Plan 5 (formerly Project Online Premium) adds portfolio analysis, enterprise resource management, and demand management features at the enterprise level. Both appear as monthly or annual subscriptions in the M365 admin billing view.

Below those two, check for Project Online Desktop Client licenses. These are standalone desktop app licenses sometimes provisioned separately for users who need the client without full PWA access. They bill independently and cancel independently.

The less-obvious items: Power BI Premium capacity nodes provisioned specifically for Project Online reporting workloads, and any third-party connectors or integration licenses (middleware that authenticates via Project Online's CSOM or OData APIs). These won't appear in your Project Plan billing view but will continue charging against their own subscriptions after September 30.

The Project Online migration cost analysis covers the full license and cost picture for the migration transition, including what you're currently spending and what your destination platform will cost. That comparison is useful context before you start cancelling: the goal is not just to stop paying for Project Online, but to route that budget to the right replacement efficiently.

What Happens to Project Online Licensing After September 30, 2026

The service retires. The subscription billing does not.

On September 30, 2026, Project Web App stops serving pages. The OData API returns 410 Gone. The enterprise resource pool becomes unreachable. None of those events trigger a cancellation in the Microsoft billing system. Your subscription continues in its current state, charged at its current rate, with the service it granted no longer functioning.

This is not a Microsoft oversight: it's the standard behavior for all M365 subscriptions. The billing system and the service are separate systems. Retirement affects the service. Cancellation affects the billing.

For monthly subscribers, the exposure is month-to-month from September 30 onward. Each missed month is one full billing cycle of spend on a nonfunctional service. For annual subscribers, the risk is a full-year renewal if the subscription's anniversary date falls within the months after the retirement. An annual plan that auto-renews in November 2026 commits you to a year of charges on a service that stopped working two months earlier.

The practical check for annual subscribers: in the M365 admin center, go to Billing > Your Products and look at the renewal date for each Project Online subscription. If any of them fall between October 2026 and June 2027, add a cancellation deadline to your migration project plan, timed to cancel before that renewal date. This is a one-time five-minute task that can save your organization thousands of dollars.

For a detailed breakdown of what breaks on the retirement date, the post-retirement service sequence guide covers which services stop in what order and what M365 admins see when the cutover occurs.

Project Plan 3 vs. Project Plan 5: What Cancellation Means for Each

Both plans cancel through the same M365 admin flow, but the operational impact of cancellation differs.

Project Plan 3 cancellation removes PWA access and Project Desktop licensing for affected users. If your organization has users who rely on the Project Desktop client for editing .mpp files locally, they lose that entitlement when Plan 3 is cancelled. This is worth coordinating with project managers before pulling the trigger: anyone who needs to continue opening .mpp files after the migration should have an alternative desktop viewer or the destination platform's import workflow confirmed before their Plan 3 access ends.

Project Plan 5 cancellation removes the portfolio-level features in addition to PWA access. For enterprise PMOs using Plan 5's portfolio analysis or demand management modules, this is where the most friction tends to appear: portfolio managers and resource managers may have built workflows or reporting on those features that need a defined transition path before cancellation.

The useful question to ask before cancelling either plan: "Is anyone still actively working in PWA or using a Plan 3 or Plan 5 feature?" If the answer is no (because your migration is complete and everyone is working in the destination platform), cancel immediately. If any users are still active, stagger cancellation by user group after each group completes its migration and validates access to the new platform.

The diagram below shows the two paths: cancelling on schedule versus missing the window.

How to Cancel Project Online Licenses in M365 Admin

The cancellation path for Project Plan 3 and Project Plan 5 is the same in the Microsoft 365 admin center, regardless of whether your organization uses a Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) or Microsoft Online Subscription Agreement (MOSA) billing account type.

1. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center at admin.microsoft.com with a Global Administrator or Billing Administrator account.
2. Navigate to Billing > Your Products.
3. Find your Project Plan 3 or Project Plan 5 subscription in the product list. If you have both, they appear as separate line items.
4. Select the subscription you want to cancel.
5. On the subscription detail page, locate Cancel subscription in the subscription settings section.
6. Select your cancellation effective date. Choosing end of billing period keeps existing access through a period you've already paid for. Choose immediate only if you need to cut access for security reasons.
7. Confirm the cancellation. Microsoft sends a confirmation email to the Billing contact address.
8. Repeat for any additional Project Online SKUs.

If your organization has more than 25 licenses on a subscription, Microsoft may require you to reduce the license count to 25 or fewer before the self-service cancellation option appears. If you hit that limit, contact Microsoft support or use the license reduction flow first, then cancel.

For organizations on Enterprise Agreements negotiated through Microsoft Volume Licensing, the self-service admin center flow may not apply. In those cases, coordinate with your Microsoft account manager or licensing reseller to confirm the cancellation process, notice periods, and any contractual obligations. Enterprise Agreement terms vary and the auto-renewal behavior is contract-dependent.

Microsoft's subscription cancellation documentation is the authoritative reference for this flow: Cancel your subscription in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Project Online Desktop Client Licenses: The Separate Line Item

If your organization provisioned Project Online Desktop Client licenses separately from the Project Plan 3 or Plan 5 subscriptions, those licenses have their own billing entry and their own cancellation flow.

Desktop Client licenses are standalone: users assigned them get the Project Desktop application but not PWA access. They're often provisioned for project managers who work primarily in the local client and only publish to PWA occasionally, or for organizations that standardized on the desktop tool before adopting Project Web App.

After September 30, 2026, the Project Desktop client still opens .mpp files locally. The publishing and syncing to PWA stops working because PWA is gone, but the local file editing functionality is unaffected by the Project Online retirement specifically. The Desktop client's continued availability depends on your broader M365 license state, which is a separate consideration.

The practical check: if you're on Project Plan 3 or Plan 5, the Desktop client is included and cancels with the plan. If you have standalone Desktop Client licenses, review them separately and add a cancellation task for those as well.

How to Avoid Q3 2026 Auto-Renewal Surprises

The highest-risk scenario for unexpected Project Online licensing costs is an annual subscription that auto-renews after September 30, 2026.

Run this check today: in the Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Billing > Your Products and look at the renewal date for each of your Project Online subscriptions. If any fall between October 2026 and June 2027, add a cancellation task to your migration project plan with a dependency on "migration sign-off."

For monthly subscriptions, the risk is lower in magnitude but still present: each missed month after the retirement date is avoidable cost. Build the cancellation task into your migration cutover plan as an explicit step on the same day (or the day after) you validate that users are working successfully in the new platform.

The decision you don't want to make under pressure is whether to cancel an annual subscription mid-term just before it auto-renews. The calculation is simple: the cost of an unintended auto-renewal is almost always higher than accepting one partial month of paid access while wrapping up the last migration steps. When in doubt, set a cancellation date and don't miss it.

M365 Cleanup After Project Online License Cancellation

After all Project Online licenses are cancelled, three cleanup items tend to be left partially done.

First, orphaned SharePoint site collections. Project Online provisions a PWA site collection (typically at <tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa) and can create sub-sites for each project. After license cancellation, those SharePoint site collections remain provisioned unless you explicitly delete them. Review and archive or delete them based on your document retention policy.

Second, Power Automate flows. Any flow using the Project Online connector or hitting the OData endpoint should be deactivated before retirement and deleted after. Leaving them running produces error-state logs and, in some cases, failed actions that generate noise in your M365 audit logs.

Third, user-level license assignments. After subscription cancellation, verify in the M365 admin center that affected users no longer show the Project Plan license as assigned. The system handles this automatically in most cases, but a spot-check confirms there are no orphaned assignments consuming seats on other subscriptions.

The 30-day Project Online shutdown checklist covers this M365 cleanup sequence as part of the final-weeks process. If you're running ahead of that timeline, the same cleanup steps apply once your subscriptions are confirmed cancelled.

Timing the Cancellation: The Clean Approach

The cleanest approach: cancel each subscription the day your migration to the destination platform is complete and validated, or on September 30, 2026, whichever comes first.

That means your migration project plan should include a formal license cancellation task with a dependency on migration sign-off. Not "cancel licenses by September 30" as a background note, but a named task in the schedule with an owner, a due date, and a completion confirmation.

Organizations still running on Project Online in August and September 2026 should plan to cancel licenses by September 30, accepting that they may lose a partial month of paid access. At that point, the service is ending regardless: the cost of an overlapping billing period is less than the cost of an auto-renewal.

The Onplana migration guide covers the full migration motion, including how to sequence the cutover for a clean transition that makes the license cancellation date obvious: when users are fully live on the new platform, the answer to "can I cancel now?" is always yes.

Calculate your Project Online migration cost vs. savings The free Migration Cost Calculator estimates your current Project Online spend, your destination platform cost, and the net savings over 12 and 24 months, including the impact of license cancellation timing. No signup required. → Open the Migration Cost Calculator

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