Office 2027 vs Microsoft 365: Wait, Subscribe or Buy Once?

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Office 2021 stops receiving security updates on 13 October. If that is the copy on your laptop, you now have a decision to make, and Microsoft would very much like you to make it in the form of a direct debit. Search engines are full of people asking when Office 2027 will arrive, as though the answer settles something. It does not. The question worth asking is whether you should be renting your word processor at all, and for most people reading this the answer is no.

There Is No Office 2026, and Office 2027 Is a Forecast

Microsoft has shipped a buy-once version of Office every three years for the better part of a decade: Office 2019 in the autumn of 2018, Office 2021 in October 2021, Office 2024 in October 2024. Extend the line and you arrive at autumn 2027, which is why nobody serious expected an Office 2026 and why the searches for it lead nowhere.

Office 2027 is the reasonable expectation, but it is still an expectation. Microsoft has said nothing about a successor to Office 2024, and it has historically confirmed new versions months rather than years ahead, so the silence tells you little either way. Software Supplies keeps a running tracker of the release-date evidence for anyone who wants the detail. What matters here is the logic underneath it.

The perpetual version of Office survives not because Microsoft is sentimental about it but because a meaningful number of organisations cannot or will not put their documents on a subscription: regulated industries, government departments, machines that never touch the internet. That is the market the Long-Term Servicing Channel exists to serve, and the consumer editions ride along with it. It is also why the perpetual product is deliberately kept a step behind. When Microsoft released the business edition of Office 2024 it raised the price by around 10%, and the features it has spent two years promoting, Copilot above all, exist only inside the subscription.

What 13 October Actually Changes

Nothing dramatic happens on the morning of the 14th. Office 2021 will still open, your documents will still be there, and Word will not lock you out. What stops is the flow of security patches, and that matters more than it sounds. Malicious documents remain one of the most common ways into a machine, which makes an unpatched copy of Office a genuine liability for anyone who opens attachments from people they do not know. That describes almost anyone running a business. Office 2019 went the same way last October, so a good many people are now two versions behind without realising it.

The timing is awkward in a second way. The same date marks the end of the year of extended security updates Microsoft offered to Windows 10 home users. If your laptop is running both, both stop receiving fixes on the same day. Software Supplies’ Office 2021 end-of-support guide covers the practical steps for anyone migrating files and settings.

The Subscription Arithmetic

Microsoft 365 Personal currently costs £84.99 a year in the UK. Family, which covers up to six people, is £104.99. A new Premium tier with more Copilot capacity sits at £189.99. Those figures have moved in one direction only: Personal was £59.99 until January 2025, when Microsoft folded Copilot into the plan and added £25 to the bill whether you wanted it or not. Business customers took a further rise in July this year, with Business Standard now £11.29 per user per month before VAT.

Run it over five years, which is roughly the supported life of a perpetual licence, and the numbers stop being abstract. Microsoft 365 Personal comes to £424.95. Family comes to £524.95. Business Standard comes to around £677 per user, before VAT and before whatever increase arrives next. Office Home & Business 2024, bought once, is £249.99 from Microsoft and around £189 from a UK reseller such as Software Supplies. You own it, it works on the day the subscription would have lapsed, and nobody can put the price up.

What the Subscription Actually Buys

To be fair to Microsoft, the subscription is not nothing. You get Copilot built into Word, Excel and Outlook, a terabyte of OneDrive storage per person, Office on every device you own with five signed in at once, and new features as they arrive rather than every three years. For some people that is worth £85 a year, and I will come to who they are.

But look at what most people actually do with Office. They write letters and reports, keep a budget or a set of accounts in a spreadsheet, put together the occasional presentation and read their email. Every one of those tasks was solved software a decade ago. None of them improves meaningfully with an AI assistant you did not ask for, and none of them requires your documents to live on Microsoft’s servers. The subscription exists because recurring revenue is worth more to Microsoft than a one-off sale, and Office is the product that keeps people paying. That is a sound business decision for Microsoft. It does not have to be yours.

The Case for Waiting Doesn’t Hold Up

The instinct to hold out for the new version is understandable, and in this case it does not survive scrutiny. If you are on Office 2021, waiting for 2027 means running unpatched software for a year or more on the strength of a release date Microsoft has not confirmed. If you buy Office 2024 now, there is no upgrade path to worry about missing: perpetual licences are version-specific, so nobody gets 2027 free, whether they bought 2024 last week or two years ago.

Consider what Office 2027 is likely to add. The headline features of the last two years have been AI features, and those live in the subscription by design. The perpetual release will bring incremental improvements, a refreshed look and a fresh support clock. It will very probably cost more. And Office 2024 will remain supported for two years after Office 2027 arrives. Buying now does not lock you out of anything. It simply means you are protected while everyone else waits.

Windows 10 Is the Bigger Problem

If your copy of Office 2021 lives on a Windows 10 machine, Office is not your most pressing issue. Office 2024 runs on Windows 10 and 11 today, but it would be surprising if Office 2027 supported an operating system Microsoft has already retired, and once the extended update year ends, the machine underneath your documents is unprotected regardless of what Office you run on it. The sensible order is to sort the operating system first and Office second. If you are weighing that up, our guide to Windows 11 Home versus Pro covers which edition is worth paying for.

Buying Office Without Paying Microsoft’s Price

Microsoft’s own price for Office Home & Business 2024 is £249.99. Alongside it sits a well-established UK market in surplus perpetual licences, resting on the principle, set out by the EU’s highest court in 2012, that a perpetual software licence can lawfully be resold. The quality of sellers in that market varies enormously. The ones worth using have a UK business address, sell named editions rather than vague bundles, deliver a key you activate yourself and stand behind it with a replacement guarantee if activation fails.

Software Supplies is one of the sellers that clears that bar, and it is where the figures in this piece come from. Office Home & Business 2024 is around £189 for Windows and the same for Mac, activated through your Microsoft account in the same way as a copy bought from Microsoft.

The adviser below will also recommend Office Professional Plus 2024, at around £79, to Windows users who would rather not tie Office to a Microsoft account. That edition deserves a sentence of explanation. Professional Plus is the business version Microsoft supplies to organisations, and it includes Access alongside the usual applications. It installs through a local tool without any account sign-in, and it is the cheapest route to the full suite by some distance. The trade-off is that your safety net is the seller’s replacement promise rather than Microsoft’s account system, which is precisely why the seller you choose matters. For a wider comparison, our guide to the best places to buy Microsoft software in the UK covers the sellers worth trusting and the ones to avoid.

Who Should Subscribe Anyway

There are people for whom Microsoft 365 is the right answer, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of salesmanship. A household of four or more is the clearest case: Family at £104.99 a year covers six people, each with their own terabyte of storage, which works out at under £18 a head. If you would otherwise be paying for cloud storage separately, the subscription starts to look like storage with Office thrown in. If you move between a Windows laptop, a Mac, an iPad and a phone through the working day, keeping all of them licensed with perpetual copies quickly becomes more expensive and more trouble than one subscription. And if you will genuinely use Copilot, rather than tolerate it, the perpetual versions will never give you that.

Businesses that need hosted email, Teams and shared storage will need a Microsoft 365 business plan regardless, because a perpetual copy of Office gives you the applications and nothing behind them. The perpetual case is strongest for the individual, the sole trader and the small office that already has its email sorted elsewhere.

The Verdict

For the Men of Means reader, the decision is simple. If you are on Office 2021 or older, do not wait for Office 2027. Buy Office 2024 now, run it until 2029, and give the subscription money to something that appreciates. If you have a large household, live across several devices or have a real use for Copilot, Microsoft 365 earns its place and you should pay for it without guilt. What makes no sense is paying £85 a year indefinitely for software you use the way you did in 2015, or holding out for a release Microsoft has not announced while your current copy goes unpatched.

Office 2027 will arrive in due course, and when it does it will be a perfectly good piece of software that most Office 2024 owners have no reason to buy.

Find the Right Licence

Four questions at most, one answer. The adviser below was built with Software Supplies and uses their prices.

Questions Worth Answering

Prices correct as of 2 October 2026. Microsoft 365 prices are Microsoft’s UK list prices; reseller prices change frequently, so check current pricing before buying.

Disclosure: Some links in this article may generate a small affiliate commission for Men of Means at no cost to you. This is not a sponsored article. All recommendations reflect our genuine assessment of each seller.