Is Microsoft Publisher Being Discontinued? Yes — Here's the Date

Yes, Microsoft Publisher is being discontinued on October 1, 2026, so convert your .pub files now with a tool like Korva, a desktop app that opens and exports them directly on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Your .pub files won't disappear when the date arrives, but opening them gets harder once Publisher leaves Microsoft 365 and stops getting updates. Here's exactly what's happening and what to do before the deadline.

This isn’t a rumour or a “Microsoft might shelve it someday” guess. It’s an official, dated announcement on Microsoft’s Publisher retirement support page. So let me front-load the answer and then walk through the details that actually affect you.

One thing up front. “Microsoft Publisher” and “Microsoft” are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Korva is an independent product and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.

The short answer, with the date

Microsoft Publisher reaches end of life on October 1, 2026. On and after that date:

• Publisher is removed from Microsoft 365. If you subscribe to Microsoft 365, you’ll no longer be able to install Publisher or open and edit .pub files inside it.
• It stops receiving updates and fixes, including security patches.
• Microsoft’s official guidance is to convert your files to PDF for viewing, and to Word if you need to keep editing the text.

That’s the whole headline. Publisher had a long run as the friendly, ribbon-driven layout app for flyers, bulletins, certificates, and newsletters, and Microsoft is retiring it. If you want the fuller background on the timeline and reasoning, we’ve written it up in our Publisher end-of-life 2026 guide.

What about my perpetual (standalone) copy?

Here’s the nuance most “Publisher is dead” headlines skip. If you own a perpetual Office licence, where Publisher came bundled with a one-time purchase of Office 2021 rather than a Microsoft 365 subscription, you can technically still install and run the app after October 1, 2026.

The catch is the word supported. After the cutoff, that perpetual Publisher is unsupported software: no security updates, no bug fixes, no help if something breaks on a future Windows version. It keeps working until it doesn’t, and you’re on your own when that day comes. Microsoft 365 subscribers don’t even get that grace period; for them, the app simply goes away.

So “can I keep using it?” has a technically-yes answer for perpetual users and a flat no for subscribers. Either way, leaning on an unsupported, soon-to-break tool to hold your important documents is a gamble I wouldn’t take.

Will my .pub files stop working?

No, and this is worth saying clearly because the panic usually outruns the facts. Your .pub files are just files. They sit on your hard drive, your USB stick, your backup, exactly as they did before. October 1 doesn’t reach into your folders and corrupt anything.

The real problem is narrower: opening them. A .pub is a proprietary binary file, technically a CFB/OLE2 compound file, and its page-geometry stream is undocumented. That’s the part Publisher itself understood and almost nothing else does. Once Publisher is gone from Microsoft 365, the most common app that could read those files goes with it. We dig into the longer-term picture in what happens to your .pub files.

Microsoft’s own answer is to convert to PDF, and to Word for editing. But note a sharp edge in that advice: Word has no .pub import filter. You can’t open a .pub in Word directly. Microsoft’s path is .pub → PDF → Word, and the layout shifts on the way through, because a PDF flattened for viewing and then re-flowed for editing is no longer the document you designed. For a one-off you’ll never touch again, that’s fine. For a newsletter you re-issue every month, it’s a real loss.

What you should actually do before October 2026

You have three sensible moves, depending on how much you still need each document.

1. Convert the keepers to PDF now. Anything you only need to view, send, or print, export to PDF while Publisher still opens it cleanly. This is the one Microsoft recommends, and it’s the right call for archival.
2. Migrate the living documents. For files you still edit, get them into a tool that keeps an editable layout. Our guide to migrating from Microsoft Publisher lays out the options.
3. Keep a reader on hand. Even after you’ve migrated, you’ll occasionally turn up an old .pub in some forgotten folder. Having a tool that just opens it saves a headache later.

The thread running through all three: don’t wait until the app is gone to discover which files matter. Do the conversion now, while Publisher is still on your machine and able to open everything.

Where Korva fits

Korva was built for precisely this moment. It’s a cross-platform desktop app, Windows 10+, macOS 12+ on both Intel and Apple Silicon, and 64-bit Linux, that opens and edits legacy .pub files and exports a print-ready PDF with photos embedded losslessly and accented text preserved.

The bit that solves the “Publisher is gone” problem: the desktop app has a free tier. Install Korva, open any .pub, tidy the recovered layout and export a PDF with no account required. It works fully offline, with no telemetry, and files that never leave your computer.

Pricing is simple. Opening, editing and PDF export are free. A one-time US$49 Korva Pro licence unlocks editable .kva saves, master pages and mail merge from a .csv on one computer, and the licence is movable. No subscription.

One honest limit: Korva exports RGB PDFs, not prepress CMYK. For digital sharing and most office, church, school, and community printing, that’s plenty. For a commercial offset run that demands CMYK separations, you’d want a prepress tool instead.

Comparison: your options after Publisher is discontinued

A realistic timeline

You don’t have to do everything tonight. But “I’ll get to it” has a way of running out of road, and the road runs out for real this October. A calm plan:

• This month: download Korva’s free desktop reader and run it on a few of your most important .pub files. See what comes through. No account, no spend, no risk.
• Before summer’s end: batch-convert your archival files to PDF so nothing critical is locked behind an app that’s about to vanish.
• Before October 1: decide where your living documents go, and migrate them while Publisher is still around as a fallback.

If you’d rather not pay yet, the free desktop tier lets you test and edit a .pub on your own computer, with nothing uploaded. If you need editable saves, master pages or mail merge, Korva Pro is available from the same download page.

Publisher’s ending is settled. What happens to your files is still entirely up to you, and you’ve got months, not minutes, to handle it well. Start with one file today. Open it, see it survive, and the rest of the plan gets a lot less stressful. You can grab Korva from the homepage whenever you’re ready.