Windows 11 24H2 Home and Pro: 90 days to end of updates

Windows 11 version 24H2 Home and Pro stops receiving updates on October 13, 2026 — 89 days from now. On the same day, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 also goes dark. Windows 11 24H2 Enterprise and Education editions keep patches through October 12, 2027; the 12-month gap is the standard 24-month vs. 36-month split Microsoft has run for consumer versus commercial SKUs since the Windows 10 servicing model settled in.

Microsoft confirmed the dates on Wednesday, pointing Home and Pro users toward Windows 11 version 25H2. 25H2 is delivered as an enablement package on the 24H2 servicing branch — the underlying binaries are already on the machine and the upgrade turns new features on rather than replacing the OS image. In practice that means a small download, a reboot, and a version-string flip, not the hours-long feature update Windows 11’s earlier annual releases required.

After October 13, 2026, 24H2 Home and Pro receive no monthly security patches and no preview updates. That is the same delivery channel that carried July’s exploited zero-days and KB5099539’s Windows 10 ESU rollup last week. A 24H2 Home box in November 2026 that hasn’t taken the 25H2 enablement package is running the same kernel it always has, with the next month’s worth of CVEs unpatched and no vendor bridge behind it. There is no consumer ESU tier for Windows 11 the way there is for Windows 10 — the cliff has no paid backstop.

Enterprise and Education fleets get the extra year, but the planning question is inventory: which SKU string is on which device. The distinction matters because Home and Pro get auto-updated to 25H2 by default (users can postpone, not skip), while Enterprise and Education stay on the branch IT selected through Windows Update for Business or WSUS. If Pro boxes were provisioned into an environment expecting Enterprise servicing, October 13 is when that mismatch surfaces in the vulnerability scanner — as thousands of “should have been Enterprise” devices missing patches Microsoft is still shipping to their neighbors on the same rack.

Concrete next step: query the fleet for the Windows edition string, not just the OS version, and get every 24H2 Home and Pro instance on the 25H2 enablement package before October 13, 2026. The devices most likely to still be on 24H2 in October are offline images, Group Policy paths that block feature updates, and OEM installations that predate the enablement rollout — old images built to a spec that nobody has revisited since deployment. Those are the ones that will still be on 24H2 the morning after the cliff.